Happy 30th Birthday Intel 80×86

Tags

80x86, Computers

For those who don’t know, the Intel 8086 was the great-great-great grandfather of the Pentium chip in your PC or Mac. The family is 30 years old. Here’s a ComputerWorld article.

The 8086, 8088 (cpu in the very first IBM PC), and 80286 had a segmented memory architecture that drove us programmers to abuse substances 🙂  Hey, I was young then. You could only address 64K directly, then you had to fool with the segment registers to get to more of the 24 bit total address space. This was finally fixed in the 80386 with its 32 bit flat architecture.

I also remember the 8080, 8085, and my favorite of the 8 bit world the 8051 microcontroller (an 8085 variant designed for embedded applications). The 8051 was the first microprocessor I really worked with professionally. I fondly remember the Intel micro development system that could emulate this chip at full speed. The first microprocessor I ever programmed was the 6502 (not an Intel chip).

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Killing Rampage in Japan: Knife Used, No Gun

Tags

guns, RKBA, self defense, violence

Blog warnings posted ahead of Tokyo knife rampage – Yahoo! News via kwout

A mass killing in Japan was done by a madman with a knife. A knife! Not a gun. As I and others have been saying for years, it is not guns that are the problem. It’s the madmen, or evil in the world, or both. In the US these large scale murders have typically been carried out with guns, so the media and politicians scream for reducing our right to keep and bear arms. It’s not the gun, it’s the human being whose finger is on the trigger.

My sympathies go out to the families of the victims.