Gleick's "Chaos" got me sent to the principal's office in high school. I went crazy for fractals. Unfortunately all I had at home was an IBM PC XT. Mandelbrot set renderings were agonizingly slow and the CGA palette was too limiting.
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."