The first Mandelbrot set plot was published in a paper by Brooks and Matelski in 1978. It is unclear what programming language they used, but it might have been F77.
This article has a short Fortran program trying to reproduce it:
But does not quite get it exactly. I was wondering if anybody can figure out exactly the parameters to get every star in the Mandelbrot “ascii-art” correctly.
Interesting. There is also fig. 1 probably the first plot of a Julia set, with c = 0.1+0.6i.
They thank Henry Laufer, a Princeton university mathematician, for the use of the computer.
The UNIVAC mainframe at Stony Brook had FORTRAN supplied by the vendor. It was almost certainly not F77 in Fall 1978.
The values of parameters are analyzed in fair detail in math.stachexchange.com
Just search for brooks matelski on that site to get
“Grid Spacing …” The cells are rectangular with aspect 5/3
Prof Laufer was a senior prof in Fall 1978. If someone was a gofer, was it a green postdoc
or a senior prof? He had the key to the Math dept
dumb terminal and acoustic modem which he let
me use. The department had no output device so
I had to hike to the computer building to retrieve
every printout.
Regards JPM