Celebrating 50 Years of the Zilog Z80: A Legacy of Computing
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
I reflect on the 50th anniversary of the Zilog Z80, tracing its journey from the Intel 8008 and 8080 to becoming a cornerstone of early personal computers and industrial systems. My own teenage experiments building a Z80 computer taught me invaluable lessons about systems engineering, while the chip's enduring presence in devices like the GameBoy highlights its remarkable impact on technology history.
Writing a linker is a lot harder than writing an assembler, writing a compiler is something you can actually do.
- ozhero
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
- YZF
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).
- tasty_freeze
The 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.
- jim_lawless
Z-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:
- vmilner
Takes me back to the ZX Spectrum 1980s when 128KB RAM was an unaffordable luxury.
(Bit like today...)
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000237/Book/Mastering...
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/zxspectrum/docs/Comple...
- jenova-marie
Happy Birthday Z80!!!!! My first little Timex computer! <3
I was just thinking of you the other day in fact! Do you remember that terrible flight simulator we wrote in your BASIC, then discovering your assembly!!!! Yes, I remember, at 10 I was incapable of ASM, but that's why they made the 6502C years later!!!!! I still love you Z80, you did pop my cherry! <3
I hope ur not still upset about that whole AIM-65 incident.....
- groos
35 years ago I had to program a Z80 by "assembling" programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board. This was made easier by writing an assembler for it. This was my way into tools which took me eventually to working on a major C++ compiler.
- Georgelemental
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