On Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 14:15 Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctech < [email protected]> wrote:
> Seeing that video makes me want to play around with game of life again. > Once it came out in October 1970 Sci Am, we were all coding it but > not nearly as much fun doing it as a batch FORTRAN job and having to > enter cells on punched cards (at least we could run that initial game > configuration card deck through a card printer to see if any errors). > > Last version I wrote was in PDP8 assembler to run on a TSS-8 which at > least allowed one to see each generation on TTY, but slow. > I also wrote a version for the PDP-8; I was sure someone else had beat me to it (an assembly version, that is), but I didn't find any versions online other than for BASIC and FOCAL—neither of which supported very many cells nor ran very quickly. https://github.com/drovak/pdp8life The version I wrote supports both VC8E and terminal outputs, both printing and video terminals alike. It's a pretty big playing field, too, but it runs quickly enough, I'd say. It'll run from OS/8 and supports initial configuration, but I don't think I ever added support to initialize from another file on disk; just TTY input, if I recall. If anyone has more optimizations, feel free to submit a pull request! Thanks, Kyle >
