25 years of Ultra Fractal!

I recently discovered that the first public release (Ultra Fractal 2) was February 8, 1999. That was 25 years ago this year, and at the time we didn't know it and didn't celebrate the anniversary.

I don't know about version 3, but version 4 was released in 2006, version 5 in 2008, and version 6 in 2017.

I first bought Ultra Fractal 4 in September 2006. How about you?

Thanks for highlighting the anniversary! 🎉 I'm happy to see UF having reached the quarter century, unlike so many software projects that became inactive during this period.

I purchased UF 5 in November 2010, but as a long-time user of Fractint (1991+) happy to test alternatives to find a worthy successor, it appears that I tried it much earlier: my first image identifiable as created with UF is from February 18th, 1999.

As I always felt rather like a fractal "zoom photographer" than a sculptor, computational performance was probably more important to me than to the average UF "artist", so the change I remember best is the speed-up of version 6, which allowed me to ditch the cumbersome approach of exploring in Fractal eXtreme, running a parameter conversion and then rendering in UF. Thank you, Frederik!

You're all very welcome, thanks for the support during all these years!