Subtitle: Conway’s Game of Life in IBM Assembler
Assembly language is what you saw from Arnold’s viewpoint in The Terminator (the first movie). I have implemented Conway’s Game of Life in IBM 390 (z/OS) assembler. (For an explanation of the game and a wonderful google easter egg, google “conway’s game of life.)
I was quite the assembler programmer back in the day, and enjoyed doing it. But this is the first IBM assembler program that I have written since 1980. It wasn’t easy if you didn’t have access to a mainframe, and they kept those accounts well locked down.
However, you don’t need a million dollar mainframe anymore to write mainframe programs; you can download the “portable 390 mainframe” for free. (It never ceases to amaze me what people will do and then give away for nothing.) I remember asking management to upgrade to the latest version of assembler back in 1979 and being told that it was thousands of dollars and that was too expensive. Now I run it on my laptop. This sort of thing almost makes my head explode.
Here’s a link to a zip file with the code. You have to swear to me that you do not work for SkyNet. CONWAY
