Yeah I had a similar thought back in the 90s and made a program to iterate through all possible images at a fairly low res, I left it running while I was at school and got home after many hours to find it had hardly got past the first row of pixels! This was a huge eye-opener about how big a possibility-space digital images really exist in!
>>danwil+(OP)
I has the same idea when I first learned about programming as a teenager. I wonder how many young programmers have had this exact same train of thought?