- The Librarian appeared in the second novel of the series, The Light Fantastic, where he was transformed into an orang-utan. This had certain advantages for a librarian, such as being able to use his hands and feet for re-shelving books. The other wizards have gradually become used to the situation, to the extent that, from Night Watch: “if someone ever reported that there was an orang-utan in the Library, the wizards would probably go and ask the Librarian if he’d seen it.”
- Reverse-engineering the surprisingly advanced ALU of the 8008 microprocessor (righto.com)
A computer’s arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) is the heart of the processor, performing arithmetic and logic operations on data. If you’ve studied digital logic, you’ve probably learned how to combine simple binary adder circuits to build an ALU. However, the 8008’s ALU uses clever logic circuits that can perform multiple operations efficiently. And unlike most 1970’s microprocessors, the 8008 uses a complex carry-lookahead circuit to increase its performance.