The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
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The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
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Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#2As the proud owner of a ZX-81 I remember staring at the Z80 instruction reference at the end of the user's manual without the faintest clue of what any of that meant. It took me some while before I managed to wrap my head around how CPUs actually run programs (vs. the high level abstractions like BASIC or other languages).
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#3No mention of the TI-84 calculator? Used by millions of American schoolchildren, programmable in BASIC, and runs on Z80 (B/W models)/eZ80 (color display models) to this day
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#4The Z80 stopped being manufactured last year unfortunately
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#5No mention of the TI-84 calculator? Used by millions of American schoolchildren, programmable in BASIC, and runs on Z80 (B/W models)/eZ80 (color display models) to this day
> Used by millions of American schoolchildren
Europe too :) When I was in high school, TI-84 Plus was the calculator the school told all of us to buy. And I see that stores in my country are still stocking them so I have to assume they are still being bought and used.
Many hours were spent by me and my friends making and showing off little programs in TI-BASIC on those calculators. None of us ever took it all the way to learning Z80 assembly however. I printed a whole manual about Z80 assembly programming for the TI-84 Plus and started reading it but never wrote a single line of assembly for it. Yet.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#6No mention of the TI-84 calculator? Used by millions of American schoolchildren, programmable in BASIC, and runs on Z80 (B/W models)/eZ80 (color display models) to this day
> Used by millions of American schoolchildren Europe too :) When I was in high school, TI-84 Plus was the calculator the school told all of us to buy. And I see that stores in my country are still stocking them so I have to assume they are still being bought and used. Many hours were spent by me and my friends making and showing off little programs in TI-BASIC on those calculators. None of us ever took it all the way…
Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess). It's actually quite insulting that TI kept (and keeps?) selling waaay outdated hardware at horrendous prices. It's the SAP/Oracle business model applied to school hardware.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#7I started programming in 1978 (In Assembler) and wanted to know not only how the software worked but how the hardware worked.
Found a great kit using the Z80 and built it and spent many nights with a logic probe and oscilloscope learning digital eletronics. Also devoured the Z80 manual learning the instruction set.
I'm nearly 70 now but remember those days like they were yesterday.
Truly a magnificent CPU
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#8[deleted]
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#9Two of my favorite Z80 anecdotes.
First, my Father wanted to try to add some peripherals to the original TRS-80 Model 1. So, what he was interested in doing was asserting the BUSREQ pin to tell the Z80 to get ready so that he could have the bus, ideally waiting for the BUSACK signal to know when it was his.
Unfortunately, on the Model 1, when you assert the BUSREQ pin, it is tied directly to the tri-state buffers that handle the address and data bus. So, as soon as you make the request, the Z80 loses all access to its memory and data -- mid cycle. Which, you know, can be Bad. Radio Shack labels this pin TEST and uses it for internal testing. But it was definitely a bit of a disappointment to my Fathers efforts.
The second one is when I learned that the Game Boy Advance has a Z80 built into its chip. The designers drag and dropped a Z80 core (tweaked for GB) just so they could run legacy GB games on it. It just kind of bends your view of the computing world when something as significant as a Z80 can just be shoved into the corner of a die for "just in case" functionality.
Just shows how far we had come at the time.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#10The Z80 stopped being manufactured last year unfortunately
There are plenty of open core alternatives that replicate the architecture and ISA. Many of these are cycle accurate. Some have been tape-out proven. Hobbyist retro-computing enthusiasts who wish to build a Z80 system still have options even once new old stock and recovered CPUs become scarce.