The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.
The "Ainulindalë" is the creation account in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, published posthumously as the first part of The Silmarillion in 1977. The "Ainulindalë" sets out a central part of the cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium, telling how the Ainur, a class of angelic beings, perform a great music prefiguring the creation of the material universe, Eä, including Middle-Earth. The creator Eru Ilúvatar introduces the theme of the sentient races of Elves and Men, not anticipated by the Ainur, and gives physical being to the prefigured universe. Some of the Ainur decide to enter the physical world to prepare for their arrival, becoming the Valar and Maiar.
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional legendarium, Beleriand was a region in northwestern Middle-earth during the First Age. Events in Beleriand are described chiefly in his work The Silmarillion, which tells the story of the early ages of Middle-earth in a style similar to the epic hero tales of Nordic literature, with a pervasive sense of doom over the character's actions. Beleriand also appears in the works The Book of Lost Tales, The Children of Húrin, and in the epic poems of The Lays of Beleriand.
The Battle of Helm's Deep, also called the Battle of the Hornburg, is a fictional battle in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that saw the total destruction of the forces of the Wizard Saruman by the army of Rohan, assisted by a forest of tree-like Huorns.
Pinball Construction Set is a video game by Bill Budge written for the Apple II. It was originally published in 1982 through Budge's own company, BudgeCo, then was released by Electronic Arts in 1983 along with ports to the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64.
Scott O'Dell was an American writer of 26 novels for young people, along with three novels for adults and four nonfiction books. He wrote historical fiction, primarily, including several children's novels about historical California and Mexico. For his contribution as a children's writer he received the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1972, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. He received The University of Southern Mississippi Medallion in 1976 and the Catholic Libraries Association Regina Medal in 1978.
Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. His dark poetry emphasized scenes and experiences in threatening, ego-less natural environments. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
David Macaulay is a British-born American illustrator and writer. His works include Cathedral (1973), The Way Things Work (1988), and The New Way Things Work (1998). His illustrations have been featured in nonfiction books combining text and illustrations explaining architecture, design, and engineering, and he has written a number of children's fiction books.
Menyanthes is a monotypic genus of flowering plants in the family Menyanthaceae containing the single species Menyanthes trifoliata. The North American form is often referred to as M. trifoliata var. minor Michx. It is known in English by the common names bogbean and buckbean.
Suzanne Hubbell was an American author. Her books A Country Year and A Book of Bees were selected by The New York TimesBook Review as Notable Books of the Year. She also wrote for The New Yorker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Smithsonian and Time, and was a frequent contributor to the "Hers" column of The New York Times.
Rick Bass is an American writer and an environmental activist. He has a Bachelor of Science in Geology with a focus in Wildlife from Utah State University. Right after he graduated, he interned for one year as a Wildlife Biologist at the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company in Arkansas. He then went onto working as an oil and gas geologist and consultant before becoming a writer and teacher. He has worked across the United States at various universities: University of Texas at Austin, Beloit College, University of Montana, Pacific University, and most recently Iowa State University. He has done many workshops and lectures on writing and wildlife throughout his career. Texas Tech University and University of Texas at Austin have collections of his written work.
Microsoft Bookshelf is a discontinued reference collection introduced in 1987 as part of Microsoft's extensive work in promoting CD-ROM technology as a distribution medium for electronic publishing. The original MS-DOS version showcased the massive storage capacity of CD-ROM technology, and was accessed while the user was using one of 13 different word processor programs that Bookshelf supported. Subsequent versions were produced for Windows and became a commercial success as part of the Microsoft Home brand. It was often bundled with personal computers as a cheaper alternative to the Encarta Suite. The Encarta Deluxe Suite / Reference Library versions also bundled Bookshelf.
Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a unique English mythology. The earliest story drafts are from 1916; he revised and rewrote these for most of his adult life.
Black and White is a 1990 postmodern children's picture book by David Macaulay. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, it received mixed reviews upon its release, but it was the recipient of the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1991. The book tells four overlapping stories, each drawn with a distinct visual style. The four stories are "Seeing Things", about a boy on a train trip by himself, "Problem Parents", about siblings whose parents behave differently one night, "A Waiting Game", about people waiting for a train, and "Udder Chaos", about cows who escape and then return to their field.
The seventeenth season of Saturday Night Live, an American sketch comedy series, originally aired in the United States on NBC between September 28, 1991, and May 16, 1992.
Cynthia Zarin is an American poet and journalist.
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is a selection of the philologist and fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's letters. It was published in 1981, edited by Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter, who was assisted by Christopher Tolkien. The selection, from a large mass of materials, contains 354 letters. These were written between October 1914, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, and 29 August 1973, four days before his death. The letters are of interest both for what they show of Tolkien's life and for his interpretations of his Middle-earth writings.
Dale Peterson is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects.
The Way Things Work was a short-lived children's television series based on the best-selling book of the same name by David Macaulay. The series was co-produced by Millimages, Pearson Broadband, and Schlessinger Media; it was distributed by the latter. The program ran daily on BBC2 and CBBC from 2001 to early 2002, before it was discontinued due to a lack of both episodes and audience. The series (hand-animated) was one of the last few educational TV programmes still shown by the BBC on CBBC. It is one of its most short-lived television series, running for only 26 15-minute episodes. The programme aims to teach basic principles of science to young viewers and revolves around the residents of the backward Mammoth Island as they struggle through daily life with the use of outlandish contraptions. The series was later dubbed into French and briefly aired in syndication on TV network France 5. A DVD containing all 26 episodes of the series was released in 2005.
Mammutland is a 2002 and 2004 broadcast animated series produced by KI.KA and ZDF. It originated in German-French-British cooperation and is based on the content of The Way Things Work by David Macaulay.
