In June 1980 I was ten years old, and my family had just gotten our first personal computer, a
TRS-80. On the cover of our first
80 Microcomputing magazine was a collection of strangely squashed Life patterns. TRS-80s had a display resolution of 128x48, so the pixels were impressively far from square. Dennis Kitsz had written an assembly-language program that could run a 128x48 Life universe at the blinding speed of 75 ticks per minute.
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Pointless Tangential Reminiscences on Computer Hardware and Software in 1980
Our computer was a "TRS-80 Model 1 Level II", with 16K of RAM -- the Level 1 had had 4K. This was long before IBM PC clones; TRS stood for "Tandy/Radio Shack", one of many competitors in the strange new home-computer playing field.
The source code for Kitsz's Life programs was printed in the magazine -- both the assembly instructions and the BASIC code for the support program. This was a fairly standard way of communicating programs; people got a lot of practice typing code in from magazine listings. Initially the alternative was a rather unreliable cassette player, which took a couple of minutes to load a 16K program, when nothing went wrong... sometimes it seemed easier just to type a program in again.
A year or two later we upgraded to 48K (maxing out the two-byte addressing system, since 16K was needed for the BASIC interpreter in ROM, plus video memory and suchlike) -- and a dual disk drive, which stored 73K on a single disk. It was mighty hard to fill up one of those disks, we thought.
I suppose this was partly because word processing hadn't really been thought of yet, at least not for the TRS-80 which didn't get lowercase letters until the Model 3 (or a custom upgrade was possible -- the main problem was that Tandy had decided to save money by having only seven-bit bytes in the video memory). Our first printer did have lowercase letters, but no descenders, so g's and p's and such were printed way high up on the line, and it printed on three-inch-wide paper tape.
_80 Microcomputing_ magazines are all archived online nowadays, and here's the June 1980 issue featuring Life:
http://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1980-06
Might be worth a look if you're interested in ancient computing history: there are many places where the implication is that 16K is quite spacious and 48K is downright huge... My father spent his working career in the 1960's and 1970's programming mainframes for a big government institution in Albany, NY, and for a good while anyway, he had to do everything with 4K of RAM plus those big 10.5-inch magnetic tape reels. Plenty of storage there, probably around 128 bytes per inch and no shortage of tape -- but the seek times weren't too good.
I thought square pixels would look better, though, though, so I tried writing a BASIC program, and found it could run Life at 64x48 at about one tick per minute. My first and only assembly-language program came along a few years later, managing one tick per second on the same grid. My bit-twiddling skills were nothing on Mr. Kitsz's, but at least the program ran!
As far as actual Life investigations go, I seem to recall I got about as far as rediscovering pulsars. All random experimentation, no thought of doing systematic searches or anything. I got hold of Gardner's articles, tried out a few glider constructions, got a Gosper glider gun going, and was suitably impressed by it all -- especially the thought that somebody somewhere had enough computer power to run a quadratic-growth breeder pattern. Don't remember knowing anything about switch engines, though they were old news by that time.
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So then I dropped the subject for a decade and a half. Spent a lot of time on computers investigating fractals, chaos theory, aperiodic tiles, and so on, but didn't think much about B3/S23 at all. I think I did write a Life simulator for every new computer I got my hands on, though, as a kind of speed test. Computers just kept on getting faster... but that's all I knew.
Imagine my surprise when I thought to look for Conway's Life on the Internet in early 2000. A whole new universe had opened up! XLife, MCell, and Life32 were available.
Alan Hensel and
David Bell and
Jason Summers and others had put together collections of patterns that did incredible things -- enumerate primes (or prime pairs, or Fermat primes), simulate B3/S23 inside a larger Life pattern, emit gliders at every imaginable period, and so on.
Achim Flammenkamp had his huge list of unlikely-looking objects that appeared, very very rarely, out of random soup.
Mark Niemiec and
Heinrich Koenig had improbably large databases of how to construct every conceivable still life and oscillator, and many inconceivable ones.
Stephen Silver had put together an incredible lexicon, hinting at just how much Life I had allowed to pass me by. Huge flotillas of spaceships had been collected, with various new and old velocities --
spiders,
darts*, and
weekenders, oh my!
[Not to mention
Corderships. I always did like Corderships. Everybody seems to forget about them most of the time.]
And that was just what I ran into first, the tip of the iceberg -- I've left many other people, pages, and programs unmentioned and unlinked, but most of
these were there waiting for me in 2000. Something like a Cambrian Explosion of new Life forms had happened when I wasn't looking.
... Bear in mind that -- just for example -- up until 1995 nobody had managed to build an odd-period glider gun. A true-period gun, that is; a pseudo-period p15 gun showed up in 1992, when a 373x372 pattern was considered "HUGE". Then in the mid-90s Herschel tracks appeared on the scene; all kinds of new possibilities opened up, and now it's hard to imagine that an odd-period gun would ever have been something especially remarkable.
So I've been fascinated by Conway's Life ever since that sudden re-discovery in 2000-2001.
Guess this has been a long answer to a simple "how and when" question -- but I had two very different answers, separated by fifteen years that saw an incredible run of technological change, in Real Life as well as Conway's Life.
* Why on earth hasn't anybody been able to synthesize a dart yet, anyway?
EDIT 12/4/2014: Must not have been trying hard enough: turns out it takes
25 gliders (so far).
