Fractint
Deep Jungle. Arne Richter. 1999.
Fractint 20.0
Time was, in the dim dead days of DOS, when programmers huddled together over warm monitors and tiny hard drives and happily shared their ideas, their enthusiasms, and their lines of code. One of the few surviving remnants of that lost, convivial, communal past is Fractint. It started out some 15 years ago as a DOS implentation of the iterative, recursive visualizations resulting from Benoit Mandelbrot's discovery of fractal mathematics. And it's still going strong. All the code of Fractint is open. Version 20.0 is the product of hundreds of minds who have contributed ideas and tweaks and improvements and expansions over the years. Bert Tyler is credited as the First Originator, and now Fractint belongs to the world. Lucky world. It is still a DOS program, but it will run seamlessly and trouble-free under Windows. The only problem is the interface, which is simple and primitive and keyboard-centered (no mice allowed here). What you do is, download the 800K file, unzip it, find the documentation file and read it. Or at least read the good parts that tell you how to do basic stuff. Then you start to play. After a while, go back to the documentation and read more. Learn to use other features. We said above that Fractint is endlessly fascinating. "Endless" is the operative word here. Fractint is a rich visual resource of great depth and variety. You may tire of it eventually, but you'll find that months pass and you go back into just to get another hit of pure eye acid. Books have been done of Fractint images. Art galleries hang the pictures, and collectors buy them. But with Fractint, you've got ready access to an infinity of do-it-yourself originals.
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