Thanks! That was definitely the most fun part of giving the talk; several people told me afterward that that was the point where the stuff I'd been talking about suddenly became real (accompanied by various degrees of "wat"), because it wasn't just talking to some abstract "hardware and firmware", it was drawing on the screen, and that made it real. And then following that up with Python-generated fractals really got people thinking about the old PEEK and POKE days.

My first programming environment was C under DOS, where you could create a pointer to video memory at 0xA0000000 or 0xC0000000 and start scribbling on the screen. I learned from a book ( http://smile.amazon.com/Microsoft-C-Programming-Robert-Lafor... ) which had an appendix showing how to draw the Mandelbrot set directly to video memory, so this was really nostalgic for me.