- The Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party was the party’s first outside California and the second outside Oakland, where the party was founded in 1966. Nineteen-year-old Aaron Lloyd Dixon (b. 1949) was appointed captain of the Seattle chapter by party co-founder Bobby Seale (b. 1936) at the Dixon family home in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood in April 1968, a week after Dixon and other young activists from Seattle met Seale and other Panthers at a conference in California. Within two years the Seattle chapter grew from a neighborhood storefront office to a main headquarters providing free breakfasts for schoolchildren, free transportation to visit family members in prison, and a free medical clinic. The Seattle Black Panther Party disbanded in 1978 after 10 years serving the community.
- 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.