Index – Tech-Science – Production of the legendary processor will stop after half a century

According to the announcement of the manufacturer Zilog, the production of Z80 processors will be completed from June 14, 2024, along with the fulfillment of the remaining orders. The Zilog Z80s were the most common microprocessor and great survivor of the first era of computer technology. With the end of production, a significant chapter in the history of technology closes.

Zilog was founded in 1974 by Federico Faggin with colleagues who left Intel. From July 1976, the company produced the Z80, which was a further development of Intel’s 8080 processor. The Z80 had a higher clock speed of 4 Mhz, handled a wider instruction set and supported DRAM memory management. It became one of the cornerstones of the computing revolution of the late 70s and 80s. It was such a success that Zilog, which had 12 employees at the start, employed more than a thousand employees two years later.

Everyone has met the 8-bit Zilog Z8 in one form or another. It has appeared in game consoles such as the Sega Master System, Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy Color, and in arcade machines such as Pac-Man. It was in Teas Instruments calculators. Z80 ticked in the Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer (you may know it from the music of Giorgio Moroder, Michael Jackson, Depeche Mode), in Sequential Circuits’ Prophet-5 (used by Jean-Michel Jarre, Gary Numan, Soft Cell and Talking Heads), also in the first MIDI synthesizer, the Prophet 600.

It was also built into cars in the early 90s and was widely used in military equipment. The semiconductor version of NMOS, for example, is preferred in military satellites, where even in space conditions

it worked steadily for years.

As part of the Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 128, it sold millions of copies. A similar home computer was the MSX produced by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation, which ran the first Metal Gear game.

One of the first copies from 1976

Photo: Gennadiy Shvets / Wikipdedia

In Hungary at the beginning of the 80s, the Swedish-made ABC appeared as a school computer in the 80s.

In the pre-MS-DOS days, home computers were thought to have a career similar to that of cassette tape recorders in consumer electronics. However, the market-conquering VHS-like standard was not born, instead the Basic programming language and the Z80, which looked forward to the era, became eternal.

No sea, no shore

The Z80s were also cloned in Western Europe and Japan, which helped Zilog hold onto the market against Intel’s own improved 8085 processor.

From 1980, Angstrem Zelenograd, VZPP Voronezh, Kvazar Kiev, and VEB Mikroelektronik “Karl Marx” produced copies in the Soviet Union and the GDR – the processors were also installed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Hungary into your advanced home computers. The machine produced by us was called Primo, and 7,000 pieces of it were produced by the Microkey Research and Development Production Company founded by SZTAKI and Elektromodul, which were assembled at the Új Élet MGTSZ in Sárisáp.

Generations of engineers and computer scientists grew up on the Z80. Its prevalence and popularity contributed to the fact that in later decades it was widely installed in industrial scales, machine microcontrollers and everything that required stable operation rather than significant computing power.

(TechSpot, Wikipedia)

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