Life for the PDP-1?

[Oscar Vermeulen]

I found this tape, 451.pt, in the papertape archive at https://bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/mixed_media/, a treasure trove where I've found many other things. Like the Lisp tape that has the indispensable save functions on it.

So this is labeled as "LIFE-B-SA-0265". The only other Life that I've found is for the PDP-1X, which is a very different beast from normal PDP-1s. It loads, but does not seem to do anything. No sources either.

If anyone feels like an in-depth research session? :-).

File attached.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Oscar Vermeulen]

Oh, there's another Life on tape 441. It differs in only one word. Attached. 

[Bill E]

I just started looking at the first one. It seems to have some IOT instructions I haven't seen, but I'm still researching. It definitely doesn't use the display. However, it starts and is running, doing what I have no clue yet. If I don't get bored, I'll post more later.

Bill

[Norbert Landsteiner]

Regarding curiosities in PDP-1 software, something to to look out for while roaming the archives is "3D World".

This was written by Steve Russell (and others?) while at Stanford. It's a game or simulation rendering 3D environments as a dot cloud. (So a FPS game in the 1960s?)

According to Steve Russell, it only rendered at about 2-4 frames per second, so didn't run very fluently, but it must have been a remarkable feat.

There's a 3d-world file with binary data at Bitsavers, but it's much too short for this and I could make neither heads nor tails of this – so it's probably a data file? However, if there's one file, there may be more (with not so obvious labels/names).

Anyways, it's one of the bigger discoveries still waiting to be made, since this isn't covered in any gaming or computer history.

(I'm not even sure, if this would run on a standard PDP-1, since Stanford had GE displays featuring subdeflection for fast character rendering. I wouldn't think that this feature was used for the game, but I have no idea how those displays were controlled/addressed.)

Best,

Norbert

[Norbert Landsteiner]

PS: Here's the 3D World file (it's actually 24K):

https://bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp1/papertapeImages/20040106/russell2/pdp1_3dworld.bin

[Oscar Vermeulen]

I looked at 3D world last night. It is an odd format, not sure what to make of this?

Not binary, because 8th hole empty,

Not fiodec text, nothing legible,

Just odd. A data file perhaps?

[Oscar Vermeulen]

Always interesting! I have a similar issue with Maize, with if I am not mistaken (could well be though) is a maze program. 

Maybe both are for the MIT PDP-1X?

[Win Heagy]

I'm curious if anyone has made any additional progress on running Life on the PiDP-1?  I've been messing around with it a bit, but haven't made any progress.  As others have noted, I can see that it's doing something, but nothing obvious in happening.  Maybe there is some kind of manual input or data tape that needs to be read after starting the program.

Win

[Bill E]

You can try disassembling it with the disassembler in my repo, which is more recent than the one in the main repo. It knows about some extra instructions, but in any case if  someone wants to spend some time digging in the code, could be helpful.

Bill