page_title: Fractint
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Fractint / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Mandelbrot fractal palette editing with Fractint. This image shows freeware DOS program Fractint version 20.0 running in 256 colour mode inside DOSBOX 0.72 on Windows Vista. Fractint's palette editor is shown in the top left corner. The small black cross-hairs in the top centre of the fractal have selected a single pixel, and the palette editor's top left box shows the RGB values and colour of that pixel (red). The position of that colour in the palette is shown by a white bordered box in the matrix below. This region of the Mandelbrot set is the same as File:Mandelbrot fractint red.png, but after its colour palette was changed.
context_page_description: Fractint is a freeware computer program to render and display many kinds of fractals. The program originated on MS-DOS, then ported to the Atari ST, Linux, and Macintosh. During the early 1990s, Fractint was the definitive fractal generating program for personal computers.
  The name is a portmanteau of fractal and integer, since the first versions of Fractint used only integer arithmetic, for faster rendering on computers without math coprocessors. Since then, floating-point arithmetic and arbitrary-precision arithmetic modes have been added.
context_section_description: Fractint originally appeared in 1988 as FRACT386, a computer program for rendering fractals very quickly on the Intel 80386 processor using integer arithmetic.  Most 386 processors of the era did not come with floating point units (Intel 80387), so the integer approach was much faster.
  The early versions of FRACT386 were written by Bert Tyler, who based it on a Mandelbrot generator for a TI-based processor that used integer math and decided to try programming something similar for his 386 machine.
  In February 1989, the program was renamed Fractint. In July 1990, it was ported to the Atari ST with the math routines rewritten in Motorola 68000 assembly language by Howard Chu.
caption: A Mandelbrot fractal with Fractint's colour palette editor (version 20.0 in DOSBOX 0.72 on Vista).
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