James Gleick's Chaos: The Software

I read Chaos while I was in high school in 1987. I promptly fell into a rabbit hole, coding the Lorenz attractor on an Apple IIe at my school.

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.

After reading the book in high school, I was motivated by the description of the water drop interval timings experiment to try to replicate it with an Apple IIe, a laser and a photodiode. I was getting measurements and almost an attractor, but BASIC was too slow and it motivated me to learn assembly to get the measurements I needed.

I think I basically lost interest in the physics and math and just kept going with computers. Still am, 40 years later!