Interesting reading in this blog post with a connection to searching for Life patterns:
… a rather obscure computer built in 1960 out of repurposed PDP parts… referred to in different places as a ‘PDP-3’, ‘PDP-2½’, or by the name ‘CASINO’ … these names all refer to the same unique computer designed by Charles L. Corderman.
It was the computer with which Corderman discovered the switch engine in 1971, the basis of all infinite-growth patterns that have naturally arisen from random soups in Conway’s Game of Life (as opposed to being deliberately engineered)
Bill Gosper is quoted as saying, on a mail list:
His computer was an absolutely unique (37 bits, no parity) large mainframe built and programmed by only three people, two of whom were gone when we met him. The design was begun by DEC, intended to be their PDP-2 or PDP-3, challenging IBM’s 709.
And Max Ben-Aaron on usenet quoted as saying
In the late 60’s & early 70’s I worked for a company (Medidata, later Searle Medidata) which started life as a not-for-profit spin-off from Lincoln Lab. (as I have heard), called American Science Institute. The chief engineer, Ed Rawson was a friend of Dec’s Olsen and he managed to get hold of the modules used for the prototype PDP-2 which never reached the market. ASI used them to build their own machine (designed, I believe, by Chuck Corderman) which they called “Casino” and was sometimes jocularly referred to as a PDP-2 1/2. Casino was noteworthy for having, very early in trhe [sic.] game, graphics capabilities
Gordon Bell, who wrote the remark about the PDP-3, was also privy to the various letters in that paper trail, and involved in establishing the DEC museum. So almost certainly the PDP-3 described by Bell is actually referring to CASINO itself, which would date its construction right back to 1960 (understandable, since that’s when the PDP-3 was going to be built anyway), coinciding with the lower bound of the 1960-1971 range. That would actually make a huge amount of sense: it would have been obsoleted by subsequent DEC machines by the late 1960s, so CASINO was no longer needed by Searle Medidata, and likely its creator (Corderman) didn’t want to see the machine go to waste so decided to repurpose it for running polyominoes in CGoL (because why not?). That would also explain why the other two coinventors of CASINO weren’t around at the time Gosper saw it: it was already eleven years old!
Reference within the article to the Gunkies wiki and a mention of @larsbrinkhoff
CASINO - Computer History Wiki
And a link to this other blog post which is surely also good reading:
See also previous topics
Lost web page - PDP 2
PDP-3 information
