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The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
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Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#22[flagged]
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#23Z-80 was the processor for my introduction to programming in assembly language on a TRS-80 model I in early 1983. Bill Barden's assembly language books and Hardin Brothers' "The Next Step" column in 80 Micro magazine paved the way.
I wrote a quick post a while back about my Z-80 experiences here:
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#24No 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
TI-83 for me. We didn't have that advanced technology.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#25Happy birthday! The Z80 was the first CPU I rode, more luxurious than the subsequent 6502 and 6510. I still have a TI calculator with a low-energy Z80. Cheers to Rodnay Zaks for "Programming the Z80"!
https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_Z-80_2nd_Edition... is where I learned about the "W" and "Z" registers -- if you don't know what they do, I won't spoil your fun reading Zaks! See also http://www.z80.info/zip/z80-documented.pdf
The MOS 6502 was introduced at the WESCON tradeshow in September 1975 and sold for $25 quantity 1. They had a transparent vase full of them, 'proving' they did volume -- but those were all chips that failed post-manufacturing testing, except for the very top layer. Still...
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 selling waaay outdated hardware at horrendous prices.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.
While I agree on bit about horrible prices, the TI calculators are well suited to their intended task[1] so I will object to the outdated hardware part. Stability is a good thing in the context of classrooms. Why should schools be spending money on replacement hardware, software, and textbooks when the curriculum itself is fundamentally unchanged?[2]
[1] Except the screens on the older models were truly horrible, from a brightness and contrast perspective.
[2] From my recollection, the calculators interfaced with hardware and software from other vendors. Then, of course, there was the vendor lock-in provided by textbook publishers.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#27The article claims:
> The Z80 is fully binary compatible with the 8080 instruction set.
It wasn't in regards to the flag register. The parity flag behaved differently for some ops.
And of course it would be possible to write an 8080 program that used undefined ops that would execute in some random way (often just duplicating an existing instruction) while the Z80 repurposed that opcode for something new.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess).
Not the same, actually! Unlike the TI-83/84 series, the TI-89, -92, and Voyage-200 all used a 68000 CPU, with a completely different (and much better) operating system.
I wrote a web-based emulator for the Voyage-200 a few years ago: https://woofle.net/v200/
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#29As 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).
Another proud ZX-81 owner, my first computer bought as kit. It made me the TI pioneer in my little city. So cool times, everything was complex and simple at the same time. I had a flight simulator in only 1Kb ram :D
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#30The heart of the mighty Australian Microbee. I still have the Rodney Zak’s book somewhere although I’ll admit doing anything fancy with assembler back then was a bit beyond me