@techknight
Why? Why not? You might as well ask why I wrote it for the 68k Macs at all. The reason is that I needed a break from writing my latest app - and writing something for an old computer, using an old compiler, seemed like a pretty good way of resting my brain without letting it idle. And, equally, I didn't want to write anything big and useful - because then my big and useful would end up taxing my brain and not being at all restful.
As to 'Why a fractal generator', I suppose the answer is 'for old time sake'. Back in the mid nineties, there was a magazine in the UK called 'The Mac'* (it was a lightweight competitor to MacFormat, with a focus on home use and entertainment). They published a Fractal Generator that I wrote (in Quick Basic for the Mac - I was young, it's no excuse) on their cover disk. It was the first time that any software I wrote got published.
Sidenote: I do actually use my classic 68k Macs (mainly a Quadra 650, with 72MB RAM and A/UX) for 'real' development work still. Back in the day, I bought a Microtek scanner and it came bundled with Freehand, Xres and Fontographer. I'm too cheap to buy a new version of Fontographer for OS X - especially when it doesn't seem to be functionally more capable than my old copy - so I develop custom typefaces for my software on the Quadra. So, in a very real sense, part of my iOS, tvOS and OS X apps are written on a 68k Mac from the early 1990s - which I think is pretty damn cool. Technically, I could use Fontographer on my PowerMac G4 in the classic environment - but Fontographer seems to do something funky with the menus, so it looks awful on anything other than System 7** - and I don't like emulation for much the same reason.
I use a revision 1 Raspberry Pi (version 1, with a mere 256MB RAM) as a helper server for my Quadra and SE/30, since it speaks their old AppleTalk and also SMB (using Samba). It also does all the ssh tunnelling for them, as necessary, and stores their backups.
*I wish I could find an archive of it online - I'd love to read some of those old issues again - mine got wet in a flood and became rather smelly papier mache.
** Aesthetics really shouldn't be so important to me!
Why? Why not? You might as well ask why I wrote it for the 68k Macs at all. The reason is that I needed a break from writing my latest app - and writing something for an old computer, using an old compiler, seemed like a pretty good way of resting my brain without letting it idle. And, equally, I didn't want to write anything big and useful - because then my big and useful would end up taxing my brain and not being at all restful.
As to 'Why a fractal generator', I suppose the answer is 'for old time sake'. Back in the mid nineties, there was a magazine in the UK called 'The Mac'* (it was a lightweight competitor to MacFormat, with a focus on home use and entertainment). They published a Fractal Generator that I wrote (in Quick Basic for the Mac - I was young, it's no excuse) on their cover disk. It was the first time that any software I wrote got published.
Sidenote: I do actually use my classic 68k Macs (mainly a Quadra 650, with 72MB RAM and A/UX) for 'real' development work still. Back in the day, I bought a Microtek scanner and it came bundled with Freehand, Xres and Fontographer. I'm too cheap to buy a new version of Fontographer for OS X - especially when it doesn't seem to be functionally more capable than my old copy - so I develop custom typefaces for my software on the Quadra. So, in a very real sense, part of my iOS, tvOS and OS X apps are written on a 68k Mac from the early 1990s - which I think is pretty damn cool. Technically, I could use Fontographer on my PowerMac G4 in the classic environment - but Fontographer seems to do something funky with the menus, so it looks awful on anything other than System 7** - and I don't like emulation for much the same reason.
I use a revision 1 Raspberry Pi (version 1, with a mere 256MB RAM) as a helper server for my Quadra and SE/30, since it speaks their old AppleTalk and also SMB (using Samba). It also does all the ssh tunnelling for them, as necessary, and stores their backups.
*I wish I could find an archive of it online - I'd love to read some of those old issues again - mine got wet in a flood and became rather smelly papier mache.
** Aesthetics really shouldn't be so important to me!