About this restoration
The Live Free or Die Universe had two homes, and both are gone: Luke Bradford’s Verizon site
(mysite.verizon.net/live_free/, 2007–2011) and the wiki at lfod.wikispaces.com (2013–2018).
This site rebuilds them from the original files, the Wayback Machine, and the ConwayLife forum.
Sources
| Source | What it gave | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Luke’s laptop: the 2009 site source (“Live Free or Die Universe”) | Every page of the Verizon site as last edited (June–September 2009): glossary (190 entries, 143 with RLE), by-type glossary, object and period tables, iteration tables, news, challenges, files page, and all 58 pattern files. | complete |
| Laptop: backups and working folders, 2006–2010 | The earliest pattern files (August 2006 onward, including the first, under rule s0/b28), the 2007 “Phoenix” folder, Word research notes, the June 2007 glossary, 178 named images, Josh Ball’s pattern files. | recovered |
| Wayback Machine: Verizon site | 24 captures, November 2007 to February 2011, including 11 pattern files from March 2008. These confirm the local copy. No images were captured. | partial |
| Wayback Machine: the wiki | 94 pages captured in 2015, 2016 and 2018, plus 86 images and the October 2013 pattern collection (21 files). | 94 of ~190 pages |
| ConwayLife forum thread (2012–2026) | Discoveries after 2009 with credits and dates. 41 patterns are reproduced here, each linked to its post. Nora Brown’s c/2 collections came from the forum attachments. | recovered |
| Luke’s ConwayLife private messages (2014–2015) | Naming and credit decisions with Arie Paap, Michael Simkin and Nora Brown. These put names back on the rows of Nora Brown’s c/2 collection: horned, unicorn, hippo and buffalo ships and the fox ship. They also confirm the horned rake and the lost sawtooth page. | recovered |
| Correspondence from 2007 onward, used for dates: the wiki’s September 2014 exports, its plan changes, and contact with other researchers. | for context |
Every oscillator and spaceship in the glossary has been run in a B2/S0 simulator to confirm that its period and speed match its description. The puffers, rakes and forum patterns were checked by eye in the player. Nine glossary objects that the 2009 site showed only as pictures were decoded back into patterns from those images; they are marked “from image”.
How the pages map
- Home, News (to September 2009), Glossary, Tables, Periods, Iterations, Challenges and Files follow the 2009 site, with its text kept as written.
- Glossary entries marked “added wiki” come from the archived wiki. Where the wiki rewrote a 2009 entry, both versions are shown.
- News after 2009 and the “Since then” section of Challenges were reconstructed from the forum and archived pages. Each item says where it came from.
What is lost
- About 100 wiki pages were never archived. Many repeat 2009 glossary entries, but these names from 2013–2016 have no surviving page: collider ship, ellipsis puffer, hex rake, hippo rake, plow trailer, pocket rake, quintessential rake, wide rhino ship, zebra ship, zipper rake and big six shooter stack, plus the Iteration guides and the p1–p19 period pages. Some of these objects survive in forum posts, just without their names attached. The buffalo, hippo, horned and fox ships, the horned rake and the sawtooth also had pages that were never archived; they have been restored from the forum and from Luke’s private messages.
- The updated collection and the wiki exports. The wiki’s 2014 HTML and PDF exports (lfod_20140922, lfod_20140929) and any collection newer than October 2013 are lost.
- The wiki after March 2018, and all page histories.
- Verizon site images on the Wayback Machine. None were captured, but the local copies survive and are used here.
Where more might be found
- Anyone who downloaded the 2014 wiki export or a later collection. If that’s you, please get in touch.