- Pierce County — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Pierce County, located in southwestern Washington abutting Puget Sound, encompasses an extremely wide range of elevations: from sea level on Puget Sound to 14,410 at the summit of Mount Rainier. The entire footprint of Mount Rainier, an active Cascade volcano encased in more than 35 square miles of snow and glacial ice, lies within the county’s boundaries. Pierce County comprises 1,675 square miles, placing it 23rd in size among Washington’s 39 counties…
northbound on Interstate 5
- The Group Decode ROM: The 8086 processor’s first step of instruction decoding (righto.com)
A key component of any processor is instruction decoding: analyzing a numeric opcode and figuring out what actions need to be taken. The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complex instruction set, making instruction decoding a challenge. The first step in decoding an 8086 instruction is something called the Group Decode ROM, which categorizes instructions into about 35 types that control how the instruction is decoded and executed. For instance, the Group Decode ROM determines if an instruction is executed in hardware or in microcode. It also indicates how the instruction is structured: if the instruction has a bit specifying a byte or word operation, if the instruction has a byte that specifies the addressing mode, and so forth.
southbound on Interstate 5
- Pierce County, Washington (Wikipedia)
Pierce County is a county in the U.S. state of Washington. As of the 2020 census, the population was 921,130, up from 795,225 in 2010, making it the second-most populous county in Washington, behind King County, and the 60th-most populous in the United States. The county seat and largest city is Tacoma. Formed out of Thurston County on December 22, 1852, by the legislature of Oregon Territory, it was named for U.S. President Franklin Pierce. Pierce County is in the Seattle metropolitan area (formally the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA, metropolitan statistical area).
