- Bruce C. Murray served as the only geologist on the team planning the Grand Tour, which was cancelled by NASA in 1972, but which led to Voyager the same year. He later became the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a position he held from 1976 to 1982, the early glory years of the mission. While leading JPL, he co-founded The Planetary Society with Carl Sagan, and currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors. He is now an emeritus professor of geology and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
- Reverse engineering the Intel 386 processor’s register cell (righto.com)
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-purpose registers, index registers, segment selectors, and more specialized registers. In this blog post, I look at the silicon die of the 386 and explain how some of these registers are implemented at the transistor level. The registers that I examined are implemented as static RAM, with each bit stored in a common 8-transistor circuit, known as “8T”. Studying this circuit shows the interesting layout techniques that Intel used to squeeze two storage cells together to minimize the space they require.