Static in the Ether

Thirty years ago today (8 June 1978) , Intel unleashed the 8086 16-bit CPU on the world, some four years after the debut of the 8080 which powered the Altair computer (something I wish I could find to own!).
Computer world has a really nice writeup on the history and development of ver the last 30 years and corresponding brief time line

Intel’s own Microprocessor Hall of Fame describes the chip as:

A pivotal sale to IBM’s new personal computer division made the 8088 the brains of IBM’s new hit product–the IBM PC. The 8088’s success propelled Intel into the ranks of the Fortune 500, and Fortune magazine named the company one of the “Business Triumphs of the Seventies.”

Intel also has a nice image (300K) of the 8086 and 8088 die.

While purists will probably grumble about the horridness of the x86 family instruction set in comparison to some RISC and embedded controller instructions sets, it has proved highly scalable, and extensible over the last 30 years.

Having a quiet evening at home is a fairly rare occurrence, but tonight it happened. Consequently I got so spent some quality time exploring the wealth of plugins available for Wordpress.  After some picking and choosing Ive added a couple, and as the title sugegsts they are “web 2.0″ - for varing definitions of the term that is.

My big concern is how much does the addition of such content actually slow down the loading of a page ? Something I’ll need to keep an eye on. Now if only I could get Slimbox to behave itself as advertised.

Quick and dirty, google mashup that has a MacOS-X feel

http://www.theplaceforitall.com/googlex/