The Zilog Z80 has turned 50

The Zilog Z80 has turned 50(goliath32.com)

43 points by st_goliath 1 hour ago | 4 comments

YZF 54 minutes ago |

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).

Georgelemental 54 minutes ago |

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

QuantumNomad_ 36 minutes ago | |

> 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.

blauditore 31 minutes ago | | |

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 selling waaay outdated hardware at horrendous prices.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.

GalaxyNova 49 minutes ago |

The Z80 stopped being manufactured last year unfortunately

nanolith 24 minutes ago | |

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.

stevekemp 22 minutes ago | |

There are clones, and updated packages these days like the EZ80, but they're not the same and they don't have the easy-to-use DIL form-factor.

Still I've always loved the z80, since my first computer the ZX Spectrum. Even now I play with z80 assembly now and again (mostly for CP/M retro-use).