The Game Of Life

While chatting on Mastodon I was reminded of what is essentially my origin story as a programmer.

In the late 70s I got my hands on a book about at-the-time new scientific discoveries and it had a chapter about Conway and Life. It had photos of Conway staring at little dots on a round display of a PDP-11 or whatever and explained the rules.

Now, in 1978, my chances of even touching a computer were about as good as riding a spare Apollo capsule to the Moon.

So I was running through Game of Life iterations on a checkerboard - the first glider in Life that I ever ran was done manually, one round at a time on an 8x8 board. Probably got about one generation per minute or so...

Fast-forward (literally) to a few years later, doing something like a generation every few seconds on a ZX81 at 64X40. That was nearly the very first thing that I ever tried to program on any computer - in a lot of ways, wanting to see Game Of Life gliders move - MOVE - across the screen was my main reason of getting that first computer in 1981.

And the photo that was in that book is what you see above. This, but as a much more grainy half-tone print, inspired a lot of my future.