- Oral-History:Federico Faggin (ethw.org)
Federico Faggin was born 1 December 1941 in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Intellectualism ran in Faggin’s blood. His father was a teacher in the history of philosophy and general history. To his father’s dismay he was interested in electronics, not the humanities. At a young age, Faggin realized that his interests were the opposite of his beloved father. He remembers being interested in machines and anything mechanical at a young age. Even as a young boy, Faggin recalls the irony of the lure of technology: he felt he could understand why machines worked, but not humans.
- A close look at the 8086 processor’s bus hold circuitry (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) revolutionized computing by founding the x86 architecture that continues to this day. One of the lesser-known features of the 8086 is the “hold” functionality, which allows an external device to temporarily take control of the system’s bus. This feature was most important for supporting the 8087 math coprocessor chip, which was an option on the IBM PC; the 8087 used the bus hold so it could interact with the system without conflicting with the 8086 processor.