The Zilog Z80 has turned 50

I 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

This is the CPU that I first learned to code on, first in TI Basic (TI-8[1356] ftw) and then Z80 assembler. Crazy to think that the CPU was "old" when I started, and it's still doing good work in those calculators even 20+ years later.

As 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).

No 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

Two 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.

The Z80 stopped being manufactured last year unfortunately

Happy 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"!

[flagged]