- J. J. Thomson and The Electron: 1897–1899: An Introduction (PDF)
This being the 100th anniversary of J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron, the October 1897 paper in which he presented his case that cathode rays are streams of subatomic “corpuscles” is attracting a great deal of attention. Viewed from 100 years later, this paper stands out as the starting point for the research into the structure of the atom that has dominated 20th-century science.
- Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor’s address and data pin circuits (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I’m focusing on a small part of the chip: the address and data pins that connect the chip to external memory and I/O devices. In many processors, this circuitry is straightforward, but it is complicated in the 8086 for two reasons. First, Intel decided to package the 8086 as a 40-pin DIP, which didn’t provide enough pins for all the functionality. Instead, the 8086 multiplexes address, data, and status. In other words, a pin can have multiple roles, providing an address bit at one time and a data bit at another time.
- Cathode Rays (en.wikisource.org)
THE experiments discussed in this paper were undertaken in the hope of gaining some information as to the nature of the Cathode Rays. The most diverse opinions are held as to these rays; according to the almost unanimous opinion of German physicists they are due to some process in the æther to which—inasmuch as in a uniform magnetic field their course is circular and not rectilinear—no phenomenon hitherto observed is analogous: another view of these rays is that, so far from being wholly ætherial, they are in fact wholly material, and that they mark the paths of particles of matter charged with negative electricity. It would seem at first sight that it ought not to be difficult to discriminate between views so different, yet experience shows that this is the case, as amongst the physicists who have most deeply studied the subject can be found supporters of either theory.