Conway's Game of Life on Dec PDP-7, Type 340 Display, & Am Radio ByteBeat Music

Here's a photo of John Conway playing Life on a PDP-1:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pict...

>Conway playing Game of Life, which he invented in 1970. Photograph: Kelvin Brodie/the Sun

From this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-...

>John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician

>John Horton Conway is a cross between Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries

Listening to a PDP-7 with an AM radio isn't exactly ByteBeat (since you're technically only allowed one line of code), but it sure sounds a lot like it:

Meet Bytebeat: A Brand New Electronic Music Genre

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkzakx/meet-bytebeat-a-br...

>Become a slave to the algorhythm.

>Heard about the latest computer music genre sweeping the internet? It’s called “bytebeat” and if this comes as news to you, don’t despair, the thing’s only about five months old, so you’re still ahead of the curve. Bytebeat is algorithmic music created from one line of code and was discovered/invented while Finnish low-tech artist and programmer Ville-Matias Heikkila (aka Viznut) and his friends were experimenting with the computer programming language C code and creating one line formulas that could produce an audio output (see below).

Bytebeat: Music from very short programs - the 3rd iteration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

Bytebeat - Music from math formulas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25aVWtNcAm0

Munching Squares and Spirograph with an AM radio is also quite pleasing:

DEC PDP-7 w/ Type 340 display running Munching Squares and Spirograph

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc

>Two display hacks run on PDP-7 serial number 129 with the Type 340 XY display option. The 340 has a P7 phosphor has a slow decay which gives Munching Squares an eerie afterglow. Both programs read the left switches to modify patterns. A small AM radio was used to pick up RFI from the Type 347 controller. For the MIT AI lab hackers the Munching Squares "music" was referred to as Munching Tunes.

Here is the 340 Vector Graphics Display Programming Manual:

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340...

The amazing retro-hacker Lars Brinkhoff has been working on emulating the 340 and its beautiful P7 phosphor with GLSL shaders for the simh PDP-7 emulator:

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/crt-simulation

https://hackaday.io/project/168401-type-340-remake

>Here is an implementation of John Conway's Game of Life on an 18 bit DEC PDP-7 with a DEC Type 340 X/Y point display. Patterns are stored on and can be called from our new JK09 PDP-7 storage device which is what we use for UNIX V0. We have set a few starter patterns including Bill Gosper's Glider Gun.

>The sounds you hear are from the Type 347 display controller. They were received using a Yaesu FT1XD radio in AM mode.

>The world supports 1296 points (36 x 36). We are attempting to increase this to 72 x 72 or 5184 points.