The eZ80 is still manufactured even though the original Z80 is not.
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
51–60 of 131 posts
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#52Z-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: https://jimlawless.net/blog/posts/z-80/
When I was a teenager ca. 1980, my local Radio Shack had a shelf of books, and I worked my way through them as my funds allowed. Since the TRS-80 used a Z80, they had Barden's book on the Z80, published by Howard Sams. I already understood programming a bit thanks to learning BASIC, and my curiosity about micro's was piqued by my mom's subscription to Byte Magazine.
Maybe it's because it was so clearly written that a kid could understand it, but it was a revelation, and I read it cover to cover. I never actually touched a real Z80, but it was a good enough introduction that I had no problem understanding other micro's including the 6502 and early microcontrollers such as 8051 and PIC.
Even today, I suspect that I "understand" modern micros by falling back on the Z80, and I recommend learning an 8-bit micro because they're simple enough for mere mortals to comprehend.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#53I had no idea about the Exxon connection to Zilog. That was wild.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#54The Z80 has a relative jump. Teenage me was loading a hand-assembled search function as an initialised array of integers in Basic, and relative jumps didn't need to be adjusted for the load location, which reduced the amount of post-load adjusting of addresses. It was +100x faster than Basic, just a straight scan.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#55I 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
Both the Z80 and the 6502 were products of corporate rejection. I'd love to see another designer introduce a FORK86-64, but things are much more complex now.
We have RISC-V.
Software binary compatibility is less important now than it has been for 30 or 40 years of x86 dominance because now we are so over-served by hardware that most software runs just fine in emulation (especially transpiling/JIT).
Compatibility also wan't too important in the 70s and the 6502 wasn't compatible with anything else. Everyone expected to rewrite everything back then whether between manufacturers or just a new model from the same manufacturer.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#56The Z80 has a relative jump. Teenage me was loading a hand-assembled search function as an initialised array of integers in Basic, and relative jumps didn't need to be adjusted for the load location, which reduced the amount of post-load adjusting of addresses. It was +100x faster than Basic, just a straight scan.
jr?
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#57I 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
I started 3 years later than you on a 4K Radio Shack computer running a 6809 8-bit CPU. I can still remember quite a few opcodes and a few months ago helped some on retrocomputing.stackexchange.com find a rather tricky 6809 assembly language bug without looking anything up. It's weird how stuff sticks around in our heads, since I haven't written any 6809 code in more than 40 years.
Despite being entirely self-taught due to never having programming classes or books, I enjoyed a long, quite successful career as a serial startup entrepreneur. In 1981 the only info for 'toy micros' was small hobby zines, local user's groups and just learning by disassembling other people's code. I started with the ROMs in the computer and learned by looking up the opcodes on a Motorola quick reference card. I got it by cold calling Motorola trying to sound like an 'adult' and the salesperson took pity on me and mailed the card for free.
I still think there's something invaluable about learning computers from first principles down to the metal.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#58I 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
May I suggest you check out the game "Turing Complete" https://turingcomplete.game/ It sounds like it may be right up your alley. Its a simplified digital logic simulator, you make basic circuits from NAND gates, and then build these into functional units in later levels, then further on you build an instruction decoder, and combine it with these functional units and before long you have a Turing complete architectur…
This looks very cool. In a similar vein, there's https://www.nand2tetris.org/.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#59No 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
The TI-84+ might be one of my favorite retro computers.
Re: The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
#60Happy Birthday Z80! My first job out of university was in Z80 assembly. (Sega Game Gear.)
As a kid, it was all about 6502 micros, but my early professional love was Z80 and it still warms my heart to think about. Sure, the “other” 8 bit CPUs had zero page, but block instructions and 16 bit extensions FTW. <3