Mandelbrot
ASCII Mandelbrot
April 2019 - present
The Mandelbrot Set is rendered on an Olivetti Te-318 teleprinter and other vintage microcomputer equipment. The number of iterations before divergence are represented by ASCII-63 "colormaps". The images are calculated on a variety of machines, including an IMSAI 8080 microcomputer programmed in MS-BASIC, a Macintosh laptop, a Raspberry Pi, and an emulated PDP-11/70.
Prints and process photos
-0.1528 + 1.0397i
Three images at 64, 256, and 8192 magnification. Qume Sprint 11/55 with 12 point Prestige Elite ASCII wheel, 8 lines / in. Greenbar paper (printed on reverse)
June 2022
ASCII Mandelbrot Set FROM -0.153044+1.040034i TO -0.152556+1.039366i, Center: -0.152800+1.039700i, Magnification: 8192.000000
Qume Sprint 11/55 with 12 point Prestige Elite ASCII wheel, 8 lines / in. Greenbar paper (printed on reverse)
January 2023
Teleprinter and terminal output
Wide format prints
Hand-assembled Mandelbrot zines
Series 1
September 2020
An emulated PDP-11/70 running Seventh Edition Unix was used to calculate Mandelbrot set images. A Bourne shell script generated a series of books of twenty random views (center location and magnification), rejecting images that were largely blank. The output text is sent to a virtual line printer /dev/lp, which is stored as a local file by the emulator. The emulated printer text file was read using Adobe Acrobat and each book of rendered output was printed as a booklet and hand assembled using a five-hole pamphlet stitch and binding thread. The unique books were distributed by mail. 207 booklets were generated, 15 were printed, and numbers 1-13 were sent to friends and acquaintances. The C program and script, which use 1979 versions of the compiler and shell, are available on Github (link).
Series 2 and 3
March 2021
An updated version of the Mandelbrot generating script creates 10 unique books in each print series. The text is rendered as a PDF using Olivettize, which prints characters using scans of an Olivetti TE-318 teleprinter typeface. Each book of random Mandelbrot images is given a unique number and time and date of rendering. Unix Version 7 (released in 1979) is not Y2K compliant, so the year 1993 is used to preserve the correct day of the week.
Photo credit: Paul Rickards
Random ASCII MandelBot
September 2020
Mandelbrot generating code created pseudo-random views and rendered these as text output. The terminal output was captured and streamed live along with a video of the model PDP-11/70 front panel. The replica PDP is a 3/5ths scale model running the SIMH emulator on a Raspberry Pi Model 4.
