Welcome to Fractal Forums

Greeting to all at the fractal forum :)

I'm Robin Bussell from Bristol, England. Part time fractal programmer of yore, currently general boffin without portfolio for a small tech company in wales.

I first came across fractals when working for a company who built the demo boards for the Inmos Transputer in the mid 80s, the Mandelbrot set was an ideal demonstration of the power of distributed computing and really caught my imagination. It was a good few years before I saw anything that matched the speed of the largest bunch of processors I was able to gather together at once ... 80 x 20Mhz cpus for a few days only alas, not bad for 1986 though!

After I left that job I was stuck back in slow fractal land like the rest of us, wrote the obligatory mandlebrot generator in C (possible unique point, it  could output to colour tektronix terminals ... guess what my job involved repairing at the time :)  )  then shortly after discovered the wonder that is fractint, got myself a compuserve account ( the internet was still on "web version 0.01" back then :)  ) purely to get hold of the source and spent the next ten years or so attempting to add various bells and whistles to the user interface... didn't go near the scary maths :)

One day I'll have enough spare time to devote to tweaking fractint again (or whatever it morphs into ) meanwhile I hang around the fringes of the fractal scene occasionally attempting to keep up :D

Other interests include power kiting, pyrotechnics, and electronics in general ( haven't combined them all yet! though I did make a sound system for my kite buggy once and have made several electronic firing systems for pyro )


Good to see some old familiar names here, happy fractalising ( or whatever, have we decided on the proper verb yet?  )


Cheers,
        Robin.

Hi Zedsquared,

It's great to meet another FRACTINT programmer. I have been working with the team for quite some time now. There is a major port going on to update it to 32 bit windows working. I have developed the true colour algorithms for it, but we haven't merged yet. Have a look at my little cut-down version of Fractint that has true colour support and generates animation frames in PNG format: http://www.deleeuw.com.au/download/SetupManpWIN.exe (http://www.deleeuw.com.au/download/SetupManpWIN.exe)

I started with a monochrome Apple ][+ and a basic Mandelbrot set took 70 minutes in interpreted basic  ;)

Take care matie,

Paul the LionHeart (http://www.deleeuw.com.au/images/LeoLion.jpg)

Hi Robin,

Your fractal experience predates mine somewhat - I didn't play with them till I found Fractint in 1999 :)
If you haven't tried it yet I highly recommend Ultrafractal http://www.ultrafractal.com/ (http://www.ultrafractal.com/)

BTW where in Wales are you ? - I'm up here in Rhos-on-Sea.

bye
Dave