Many may be surprised to know this, but The historic Zilog Z80 processor is still produced today in various more up-to-date variants. And yes, that’s not a mistake, we’re talking about a chip that hit the market in 1976 and is present in some of the most famous devices in the history of electronics. As it is, it has come close to reaching its half-century anniversary as an up-to-date chip and in demand for multiple uses.

The bad news, and this is why he won’t live to be 50, is that Zilog recently informed its customers about the end of production of the Z80 in many of its current variants. In this announcement, we can read that Zilog invites these clients to make the last necessary orders with a deadline of June 14 of this year, the last day when orders for these integrated products will be accepted. And given that their demand will grow sharply, they reserve the right to set minimums and maximums in accepted orders. So it can be assumed that their production will continue until all the orders received are satisfied, but once the last one is completed, the production of the chip that has earned the name of the Swiss army knife will definitely end with endless benefits.

The younger ones, if they weren’t interested in the history of technology, will surely wonder what I’m talking about, and why was this chip so important, so let’s start with a little history. It’s 1974 and Intel has just launched one of its historic chips, also the legendary Intel 8080, the great protagonist of the jump to eight bits, compared to the four bits of another integrated chip, also a historical reference, the Intel 4040. These two processors had of course quite a few things in common and one of them was that the chief designer at Intel at the time was Federico Faggin with Masatoshi Shima as the main person responsible for the logic and transistor levels. both processors.

It was the time of the emergence of electronics and Deciding to embark on his own adventure, Faggin left Intel to found Zilog with the intention of creating his own chip, a task for which he counted on Shim, among others (the company had a total of 12 employees, including Faggin). Both had learned a lot with the 4004 and 8080 designs, so they started from a privileged position that allowed them to “recycle” much of their work in creating their first eight-bit chip and introduce some improvements. on their previous work at Intel. The result, as you might have guessed, wasThe first processor marketed by Zilog, the Z80, which debuted in its first version in 1976.

Compared to today’s processors, the Zilog Z80 may seem like a toy chip with an eight-bit bandwidth, 2.5 megahertz speed, and around 6500 transistors, but at the time it managed to surpass the then reference, the 8080, in many aspects. It was faster, contained an expanded instruction set, substantially improved RAM management, and an aspect that was also key to its success was cheaper than the Intel chip.

About two years ago, in the obituary we dedicated to Vangelis, I did a bit of a retrospective reminiscing about the fizz of the 1970s, it takes us straight to how important that decade was to the emergence of consumer electronics, which later grew exponentially in the 1980s, as he recalled just a week later, in Andrew Fletcher’s obituary. (and yes, seven days later she completed the sad trilogy with Dave Smith’s obituary).

If you ask people who lived through those decades about the devices they remember most from those days, their answers will undoubtedly be very varied. Many will talk to you about computers, but others will talk about consoles, synthesizers, programmable calculators, the first laptop… the list is very long, but you know what’s interesting? So The Zilog Z80 was present in all of these device familiesand he did better than well in all of them.

One of the first well-remembered computers to be based on the Zilog Z80 was the historic Radio Shack TRS-80, a computer that played a key role in the early popularization of the home computer, priced at the time at $599.95 (1977). And yes, as I already mentioned in the publication for his birthday, it may seem extremely expensive now, but at that time the prices of home computers did not fall below $ 1,500. So yes, indeed, it was quite a bargain at the time and as such the company accepted it.

A year later, in 1978, another device was to arrive that also made history, Prophet-5 synthesizer by Sequential Circuits, signed by Dave Smith, whose obituary I recalled a few paragraphs above. It was so revolutionary in the world of music that it is not only remembered but still used today, either in physical versions or through software that reproduces its design and operation. And yes, we found a Zilog Z80 inside the Prophet 5.

Let’s jump two years again, to 1980, a year that we remember mainly for two reasons when it comes to the Z80 (although one of them didn’t directly include the Zilog chip, as I’ll explain now). We begin with Microsoft’s first foray into the world of hardware introduction of the Z80 SoftCard, an expansion card designed for the Apple II which installed the Z80 and whose function was to make the system compatible with CP/M, the operating system designed for the Intel 8080. Its popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s was enormous, and since the 8080 and the Z80 shared an architecture, the Zilog chip was with it compatible, which was not the case with the MOS 6502, which was an Apple II processor. If you want to delve deeper into the history of the Z80SoftCard, be sure to read this article.

Another historic event in 1980 was the launch of the ZX80, signed by the incomparable Sir Clive Sinclair, a computer that this time made computing accessible to virtually every household, as it was priced at £79.95 in kit form, or £99.95 assembled. Of course, in this case we will not find the Z80, but The NEC μPD780C-1, which was actually nothing more than a clone of the Zilog chip made by Japan’s NEC.

A year after the huge success of the ZX80 came another computing milestone, the first notebook to achieve commercial success. I speak, some will know, FrOsborne 1a team that knew how to bring to market what some previous projects and prototypes had already proposed, such as the NoteTaker from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox. Seen today, it can be terrifying, with its eleven kilograms of weight, its five-inch display and its two 5 1/4 floppy disk drives, but the truth is that it was revolutionary And yes, exactly, its processor was a Zilog Z80.

Today, April 23, is Book Day, but we are also commemorating another important anniversary. On this day, but 42 years ago, Sinclair Research launched the legendary ZX Spectrum, a small computer that literally changed the lives of some of us. I still have it. pic.twitter.com/A4qw8vuSfb

— Aviator Duck (@AviadorPato) April 23, 2024

We’re skipping a year again and we’re doing it to commemorate the computer that celebrates today, April 23, because as one of my reference aviation consultants, Pato Aviador, reminded me today, The ZX Spectrum celebrates 43 years. With this gear, this time Sinclair has gone with the original and not the clone, putting together the Zilog Z80 in gear that all of us who were kids/teenagers/young people in the 80’s remember with tremendous and more than deserved fondness.

Just because the ZX and its clones had a Zilog processor didn’t mean it was exclusive to them. As those who lived through those days remember, at least in Spain it was an open war between Amstrad, Commodore, MSX and Spectre. Well, apart from the Commodore 64 which had a MOS Technology 6510 CPU, which is an evolution of the Apple II 6502 I mentioned earlier, the rest of the equipment in contention, that isVarious versions of the ZX Spectrum (like Inves Spectrum 48), those based on the standard MSX and Amstrad CPC 464 and 6128all used a Zilog Z80 processor.

Over time, the Z80 was also the processor present in the last of Clive Sinclair’s forays into the world of computing. It was in 1988, with an interesting twist that it gave to the concept of the notebook s Cambridge Z88a device that, in the current view, would not be clear whether to classify it as a proto-laptop, proto-PDA or proto-tablet.

The Zilog chip also played a very important role if we are talking about video game consoles, although we have already jumped to the beginning of the 90s and at that time it was the CPU of choice by Sega for both home Main system like for a laptop game equipment. And again we find an indirect presence, given that The Game Boy and Game Boy Color had a Sharp LR35902 CPU which, as you may have guessed, was indeed based on the Z80.

That as the main CPU, but the Zilog chip also proved to be solvent as an integrated that is responsible for a specific task in the device. In this sense, and without leaving the world of consoles, the Z80 was also present SNK Neo-Geo, Sega Mega Drive and in multiple arcadesthe vast majority of cases in the part of electronics responsible for sound.

We could continue from this point incredibly extensive list of devices equipped with this integrated, which has so far been devoted to less notable but equally important purposes such as embedded devices, programmable calculators, and due to its reliability and ease of programming in all types of electronics-related projects. In fact, as we told you in 2019, an operating system designed to survive the apocalypse was designed for use in Zilog Z80-based systems.

This end of production therefore means farewell to an integrated unit that has made history for almost 50 years and which deserves to be remembered as one of the most successful, versatile and reliable milestones in the history of electronics and technology. They deserve nothing less.

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