I probably generated my first mandelbrot in '86 a year or so after the famous Scientific American article. A work-mate brought in the magazine and following his instructions (I knew nothing of complex numbers) I coded up a simple C program on the office IBM AT, it had a colour screen! A 320x200 2bit image might take the whole night to generate. Nowadays the images are bigger and 24 bit but with each advance in processors just tempts you to zoom in further. I don't like leaving my PC generating picture for more than a couple of days. After a three day marathon in summer the PC got too hot and just stopped!

My first posts were generated with Fractal Extreme these days I'm using Kalles Fraktaler. Back when I was using Fractal Extreme its limited, for me :-), palette of 228 colours just wasn't enough. I used to layer the pictures using Gimp. With Kalles Fraktaler's 1024 colour palette I do much less of that now. I can achieve my psychedelic snail shell type colouring with just one layer.

I have a YouTube Channel with lots of Fractal Zoom videos www.youtube.com/user/CommandLineCowboy Many videos have links in the description to higher quality versions on mediafire, the YouTube compression is set a bit low for fractals. I'm occasionally on FractalForums.org as user panzerboy.