The history of cellular automata is only quite recent, coming to life at the hands of two fathers, John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the early 1950s. Subsequent work in the early 1960s included that of Ulam and his co-workers at Los Alamos and by John Holland at the University of Michigan whose work on adaptation continued for several decades. Early theoretical research was conducted by Hedlund, Moore, and Myhill, among many others, not always under the name of cellular automata (CA), since the concept was still in its formative stages. A big boost to the popularization of the subject came from John Conway's highly addictive Game of Life presented in Martin Gardner's October 1970 column in Scientific American. Still the study of CA lacked much depth, analysis, and applicability and could not really be called a scientific discipline.