clockwise around Elliott Bay
- Seattle Neighborhoods: Magnolia — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, a peninsula situated at the northern entrance to Elliott Bay, is home to pairs of nesting eagles as well as 20,000 human residents (in 2001) dependent upon bridges to gain access to the rest of the city. Magnolia consists of two hills once blanketed by forests and separated by a natural meadow. The area’s development started in 1853 with a dreamer’s vision of a transcontinental railroad, which arrived four decades later. Also at home in Magnolia’s four square miles is the oldest lighthouse on Puget Sound, Discovery Park (Fort Lawton), a state-of-the-art water treatment plant largely hidden by foot paths and creative landscaping, and Fishermen’s Terminal, which berths much of Puget Sound’s fishing fleet.
- How the 8086 processor’s microcode engine works (righto.com)
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing. The 8086 chip uses microcode internally to implement its instruction set. I’ve been reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos and this blog post discusses how the chip’s microcode engine operated. I’m not going to discuss the contents of the microcode1 or how the microcode controls the rest of the processor here. Instead, I’ll look at how the 8086 decides what microcode to run, steps through the microcode, handles jumps and calls inside the microcode, and physically stores the microcode. It was a challenge to fit the microcode onto the chip with 1978 technology, so Intel used many optimization techniques to reduce the size of the microcode.
- Magnolia, Seattle (Wikipedia)
Magnolia is the second largest neighborhood of Seattle, Washington by area. It occupies a hilly peninsula northwest of downtown. Magnolia has been a part of the city since 1891. A good portion of the peninsula is taken up by Discovery Park, formerly the U.S. Army’s Fort Lawton.