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I was blown away that no matter where I zoomed in, there was more detail. Did humans create those features by inventing mathematics, or did they exist independently in the universe, waiting to be discovered? So many teenage philosophical conversations were prompted by that experience!
The program in Applesoft Basic was SLOW! It's too bad it didn't motivate me to learn 6502 assembly.
That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my high school mind and point me in the direction of high performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical causality.
Around this time my co-conspirator and I realized the library had 386s that almost no one was using for catalog search. They became our fractal render farm. We'd exit the catalog program, insert a floppy with our latest renderer, kick off a deep zoom, and turn off the monitors to avoid suspicion until we could check back next period. The results were thrilling. What a difference the access to compute made.
You all know the story -- eventually the librarian found us out and reported us for "hacking."
Around the same time, I was wandering around the I saw a book cover with the weirdest, most beautiful looking graphics I’d ever seen. I still remember thinking “What the hell is that supposed to be?” as I picked it up. The copy I held had a colored picture segment as the middle pages with crisper, more mindblowing images. I borrowed the book and started reading it, trying to figure out how those images were drawn.
Long story short, I ended up becoming quite competent at mathematics. Fractals (albeit statistical ones) actually ended up being an important topic in my doctoral research. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t seen those weird images - I’d certainly have become a very mediocre architect at best.