dustbunnies nearly 40 years later

[miriam_e]

Way back in 1987 I was playing around with my Tandy Color Computer (affectionately known as the CoCo) making a simulation of how dust falls to form dustbunnies. I got the idea from January 1987 Scientific American article "Fractal Growth". I no longer have my CoCo, but I do have XRoar, which is a CoCo emulator. Luckily, being a chronic hoarder, I have saved most of my old CoCo programs, including that, so I ran it again on the emulator. 24 hours later it looked like the first picture below.

I also tried running a program that does the same thing using my graphics server, but with a program written in C (written mostly by Claude AI). The second picture is at the same resolution as the CoCo's screen (256x192 pixels). It took 0.05 second -- that's a half of a tenth of a second. 🙂


24 hours on the CoCo


0.05 second C program on Linux with my graphics server