This was too easy. Copied the pseudocode from this page on Wikipedia onto the timeline of an AS3 FLA in Flash CS3, massaged it a bit, wrapped stuff in functions and added some data types, and came up with this:
[kml_flashembed movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/mandelbrot.swf” width=“520″ height=“400″/]
I’d say it was less than 30 minutes before I had the old familiar shape on screen. Then another hour and a half to finish, almost all of which was spent on the coloring. Click anywhere to zoom in by 2X on that point. Press any key to reset. Don’t go too crazy clicking around. It takes a couple of seconds to render. Wait for it before clicking again.
I remember playing around with this stuff back in the 80s. I know we consider Flash slow still, but I would have killed for something that rendered this fast back then. 🙂