Nothing to do with postscript, but regarding Life, the early Windoze/OS2 accellerators based on the IBM 8514/A (ATI and I think Paradise made one) had enough logic to also calculate life, and quite a bit faster than the 486/33 that was the standard CPU at the time. There were books available documenting how to program the 8514 at the hardware level from DOS, which was pretty cool. The 8514 used 8 bits per pixel, and had logic to compare a pixel against a reference value, which would determine whether or not the pixel should be written. (The weird and frustrating part of the 8514 was that it didn't compare the source, so it wasn't great at doing sprites with transparent colors. But it could compare against the destination.) The 8514 could also perform 8 bit additive blits. So just jitter some additive blits to get a neighbor count, use the pixel compare (both less than and greater than supported) to kill the starving and overfed cells, and finally convert the living ones back to 1 or 0 for the next screen. Of course you needed a couple of offscreen buffers, and the small (1 MB?) amount of video ram prevented really large simulations.
Now a days, the OpenGL Redbook explains how to implement Life, and the nVidia SDK also has an implementation of Life (implemented as a pixel shader?)
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Nothing to do with postscript, but regarding Life, the early Windoze/OS2 accellerators based on the IBM 8514/A (ATI and I think Paradise made one) had enough logic to also calculate life, and quite a bit faster than the 486/33 that was the standard CPU at the time. There were books available documenting how to program the 8514 at the hardware level from DOS, which was pretty cool. The 8514 used 8 bits per pixel, and had logic to compare a pixel against a reference value, which would determine whether or not the pixel should be written. (The weird and frustrating part of the 8514 was that it didn't compare the source, so it wasn't great at doing sprites with transparent colors. But it could compare against the destination.) The 8514 could also perform 8 bit additive blits. So just jitter some additive blits to get a neighbor count, use the pixel compare (both less than and greater than supported) to kill the starving and overfed cells, and finally convert the living ones back to 1 or 0 for the next screen. Of course you needed a couple of offscreen buffers, and the small (1 MB?) amount of video ram prevented really large simulations. Now a days, the OpenGL Redbook explains how to implement Life, and the nVidia SDK also has an implementation of Life (implemented as a pixel shader?)