As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…)
The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications.
Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC.
↫ David Oberhollenzer
The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I’ve used a ton more over the decades that I don’t remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments’ stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996.
I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class – I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class.
Good times, made possible by the Z80.
Man, that little exposition about the relative time… Not that it made me feel old, I already feel old at this point, but it just made me realize how weird it is to have grown up playing with Commodores and Apple IIs (both made before I was born, but I was born just early enough that these were often at the thrift store for $10), used those 8-bits extensively, typing this on a 10-core supercomputer that was only $400 on sale right before the AIpocalypse, building a homelab from $50 thin clients with better graphics than my gaming rig in the 2000s, and on the cusp of some weird revolution where some religious zealots are determined to make us believe that because we can make machines fast enough to run splattered together code with no regard to anything but “does it appear to do what I asked splatterbot to splatter together?” that we’re luddites if we would even consider taking a minute to see if we understand what substances have been splattered… Again, coming from growing up with 8-bits, where one could conceivably have the assembly source of the entire OS memorized, it’s just a really weird place in time to live in right now.
Imagine running a hundred 8 bits games at the same time on a 2019 Windows ARM64 machine : http://www.emulators.com/Videos/XformerDemo1.mp4 (at 3m22s)
Great demo! I wonder how far this idea could really go? Multiple hundreds of at least SEGA Megadrive towers of power at this point?
Not to forget that it was in the good ole Swedish computer: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_80
As far as i’m aware, the original incarnation of RCA made one single model of general purpose microcomputer NOT based on their own homegrown 1802 processor. And that was a Z80 based variant of their MS2000 development system, called the MS2000Z
I have absolutely no idea how many were made, or even if they were sold. But if the 1802 based MS2000 is anything to go on, they sold practically none.
I have a complete and working MS2000 dev system, which i believe is the last surviving of it’s type. And early this year i was also fantastically lucky enough to get the important half of the MS2000Z boardset, and dumped the ROMs. So RCA’s lost and forgotten Z80 system isn’t actually lost and forgotten any more
It’s crazy that the original one was being made until 2024 while its improved variant, the eZ80 It’s still being produced.
Wow! I was 11 when the Z80 was “born”, and made my first lot of real money writing programmes for it it a decade later.
I wrote, in Z80 assembly language, code that controlled deposit-taking machines for major UK banks.
My development machine was a NewBrain running CP/M. I used the Microsoft MASM assembler and their linker as well, but I cannot remember how we burned the EPROMS.
Zilog created a wonderfully orthogonal assembly language for the Z80, while Intel’s parallel assembly language for the 8088 was terribly confusing and unintuitive.. To my mind, Zilog’s assembly language was very much better than Intel’s for the same 8-bit processors, it is a real shame we are now where we are with (to my eye) hard to understand assembler code, based on Intel rather than Zilog syntax.
A
AlistairH,
I didn’t even know there was such a thing as “Zilog syntax”, haha. While I am unfamiliar with Zilog asm, I preferred intel assembly next to ATT assembly though. Using a good assembler is also important. While microsoft were dominant in the space and sometimes unavoidable, every company I did assembly work for actually preferred bordland tasm along with borland’s far superior debugging tools. DJGPP (and RHIDE) were excellent as well. Even when the windows transition obsoleted these DOS based tools, the microsoft C compiler and linker did not improve with windows. I actually do like what MS did with net, but every microsoft C project still comes with a serving of misery.
Cannot remember Z80 assembly being that different to x86 Intel’s, just minor syntax tweaks and instruction and register names difference. AT&T like syntax on the other hand was really annoying at first.