- Just Do It (Wikipedia)
Just Do It or JDI for short is a trademark of shoe company Nike. The slogan was coined in 1988 at an advertising agency meeting. The founder of the Wieden+Kennedy agency, Dan Wieden, credits the inspiration for his “Just Do It” Nike slogan to death row Gary Gilmore’s last words: “Let’s do it.” From 1988 to 1998, Nike increased its share of the North American domestic sport-shoe business from 18% to 43% (from $877 million to $9.2 billion in worldwide sales). In many Nike-related situations, “Just Do It” appears alongside the Nike logo, known as the Swoosh.
- Latches inside: Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086’s instruction register (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and server computing today. But it is still simple enough that its circuitry can be studied under the microscope and understood. In this post, I explain the implementation of a dynamic latch, a circuit that holds a single bit. The 8086 has over 80 latches scattered throughout the chip, holding a variety of important processor state bits,1 but I’ll focus on the eight latches that implement the instruction register and hold the instruction that is being executed.