Timeline of Life facts

[Book]

This thread relates to the wiki article https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Life_facts. This article, as it says, is intended to chronicle key events in CGOL during its first 50 years. I propose we use this thread to discuss missing items in the timeline as it seems to me to be a bit sparse. Also welcomed are suggestions for rewording items.

What do you think is missing from the list of key events in the life of CGOL during its first 5 decades?

[hotdogPi]

The Snark and the unsynthesizable still life.

[dvgrn]

This thread relates to the wiki article https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Life_facts. This article, as it says, is intended to chronicle key events in CGOL during its first 50 years. I propose we use this thread to discuss missing items in the timeline as it seems to me to be a bit sparse. Also welcomed are suggestions for rewording items.

What do you think is missing from the list of key events in the life of CGOL during its first 5 decades?

Yikes, that list is so sparse that it's mostly holes. I'll add a few items per decade:

1970s:
Martin Gardner writes two popular "Mathematical Games" columns in Scientific American, thereby introducing the Game of Life to a much wider audience.
Life's computational and construction universality is demonstrated fairly convincingly by late 1971, but without a complete published proof from either Conway's group or Gosper's group.

1980s:
XLife is developed in 1989, allowing much larger patterns to be simulated relatively efficiently on "modest hardware".

1990s:
A universal set of Herschel conduits is completed, enabling complex signal processing using stable constellations of small still lifes.
Johan Bontes' fast CA editor Life32 becomes available in the mid-1990s.
A few years later, Alan Hensel's fast Java applet makes his extensive pattern collection easily available on the Internet.

2000s:
In 2004 the first self-supporting mega-spaceship is completed (the Caterpillar).
The first version of Golly is released in 2005.
In 2006 Brice Due's OTCA metapixel appears (just in time to show off Golly's HashLife capabilities).

2010s:
In 2010 Adam P. Goucher completes a pi calculator pattern based on APGsembly.
Also in 2010, out of the blue, Andrew D. Wade surprises the Life community with a complete self-constructing spaceship (Gemini.

2020s:
... this isn't "in the first fifty years", but why stop a good timeline in the middle?

In 2022 the first oscillator with an unsynthesizable rotor appears.

[GUYTU6J]

First, I suggest moving an older thread of the same topic to General Discussion and merging this one to it.

Second, why do we need to develop two sets of timeline, where one is detailed like the previous animation and the other is brief like the current LifeWiki article?

[Book]

The wiki page has been updated reflecting the suggestions made in this thread and a few of my own thoughts.