30 Apr
2020
30 Apr
'20
12:41 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 14:15 Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> 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