It was my first program in Turbo Pascal. Until then I'd been a BASICA programmer and opposed to "structured programming," which I thought would stifle my creativity. I'd spend long days with code printouts all over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to find my bugs.

Then dad brought home Turbo and I tried it out with the GoL. It worked correctly the first time it ran. That had never happened to me before. I never touched BASICA again.

Sad to see Conway go. He was born the same year as my dad, who died several months ago.

Have a look at Hashlife (eg via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife) to see some exciting ways to compute GoL faster.

Agreed! The first time I learned about this algorithm, I was pretty mind blown :)

Yeah, I built a Game of Life way back when.