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The formal specification and partial verification of the VIPER microprocessor is reviewed. The VIPER microprocessor was designed by RSRE, Malvern, England, for safety critical computing applications (e.g., aircraft, reactor control, medical instruments, armaments). The VIPER was carefully specified and partially verified in an attempt to provide a microprocessor with completely predictable operating characteristics. The specification of VIPER is divided into several levels of abstraction, from a gate-level description up to an instruction execution model. Although the consistency between certain levels was demonstrated with mechanically-assisted mathematical proof, the formal verification of VIPER was never completed.

1Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making

By Alan St. Hill Brock

Captain St. Hill Brock presents here, in Part I, a brief history of pyrotechnics from origins in the East through the present. Part II delves more into a description of the fireworks themselves, there manufacture, and some modern uses, and a tribute to his brother, Wing-Commander Frank Arthur Brock, R.N.A.S. Killed at Zeebrugge April 23rd, 1918. From his introduction: “My object has not been to write a text-book on firework-making, but rather to trace the art from earliest times, and to give a description of the development and process of manufacture. . . . My excuse for adding another volume to the literature of the art is that I am of the eighth generation of a family of pyrotechnists, whose work, I venture to claim, has not been without its effect.” - Summary by Larry Wilson