I also used Dice C, starting with the free version that I got from one of the Fish Disks. I didn't have dialup access to anywhere but a local computer retailer used to charge NZ$5 for Fish disks, which were my main source of software in small-town NZ.
For a school project (fractals!) I needed floating point support, which the free version of Dice C didn't have. I wrote a letter to Matt Dillion and he very kindly sent me the 3 disks of the full Dice C by return post (about 4 weeks). I still remember what a pain it was to arrange an international money order to actually pay him.
That must have been 1991. My program very slowly drew a 320x256 Mandelbrot set in 32 colors - as I recall it took about 90 seconds on a A500.
By coincidence I was mucking around with Cuda the other day and wrote a short un-optimized program to draw a 2048x2048 Mandelbrot in 256 colors - over 80 times more data - in about 2 seconds. This 2 year old laptop is about 3680 times as fast as my old A500.
For a school project (fractals!) I needed floating point support, which the free version of Dice C didn't have. I wrote a letter to Matt Dillion and he very kindly sent me the 3 disks of the full Dice C by return post (about 4 weeks). I still remember what a pain it was to arrange an international money order to actually pay him.
That must have been 1991. My program very slowly drew a 320x256 Mandelbrot set in 32 colors - as I recall it took about 90 seconds on a A500.
By coincidence I was mucking around with Cuda the other day and wrote a short un-optimized program to draw a 2048x2048 Mandelbrot in 256 colors - over 80 times more data - in about 2 seconds. This 2 year old laptop is about 3680 times as fast as my old A500.