my personal computer didn't have sufficient power to generate these in any useful amount of time
I know the feeling. I started with the Commodore 64, and doing something like fractals was just painfully slow. Of course, some enterprising people found a way to do multi-processor computing on those: The floppy drive used the same processor as the computer, so if you hooked up multiple of those(*) you could speed up the process quite a lot.
(*) These were the days of uhm, backing up every game disk you could get your hands on and uh, storing them at all your friends houses for, well, "safekeeping". Having multiple disk drives just sped up the process. Nothing to do at all with software piracy...
perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'
