- Julius Fučík (Czech: [ˈjulɪjus ˈfutʃiːk]) (23 February 1903 – 8 September 1943) was a Czech journalist, critic, writer, and active member of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. For his part at the forefront of the anti-Nazi resistance during the Second World War, he was imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in Prague, and executed in Berlin. While in prison, Fučík recorded his interrogation experiences on small pieces of paper, which were smuggled out and published after the war as Notes from the Gallows. The book established Fučík as a symbol of resistance to oppression, as well as an icon of communist propaganda.
- Analyzing the vintage 8008 processor from die photos: its unusual counters (righto.com)
The revolutionary Intel 8008 microprocessor is 45 years old today (March 13, 2017), so I figured it’s time for a blog post on reverse-engineering its internal circuits. One of the interesting things about old computers is how they implemented things in unexpected ways, and the 8008 is no exception. Compared to modern architectures, one unusual feature of the 8008 is it had an on-chip stack for subroutine calls, rather than storing the stack in RAM. And instead of using normal binary counters for the stack, the 8008 saved a few gates by using shift-register counters that generated pseudo-random values. In this article, I reverse-engineer these circuits from die photos and explain how they work.