Happy 50th Birthday To The 8-Bit CPU

The Intel 8008 - the forerunner to the 8080 series of CPUs that you might possibly be using right now.

8 bit CPUs look primitive today - but they made the dedicated chess computer (and many other technologies) possible.

Back then, you could still see the wires! From https://www.techspot.com/article/1397-intel-8008-microprocessor/

After 50 years, the Z80 has finally ceased production!

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/

Key points:

1. It was successful because it could emulate the 8080 instruction set, so it came to market with software already available for it

2. It had a complex instruction set compared to the 8080 and the 6502. For me, this was a good thing: early home computers had very little memory, and more complex CPU instructions meant you could have smaller programs (this did make it more expensive to buy initially, and some instructions took many clock cycles to run)

3. It will live on forever in ghostly form: there are a huge number of emulators for it!

4. It also lives on as a 16-bit CPU - link!

So goodbye to one of the great 8-bit CPUs, and thank you for the changes to our lives that you ultimately made possible!

TheSelfImprover wrote:

After 50 years, the Z80 has finally ceased production!

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/

Key points:

1. It was successful because it could emulate the 8080 instruction set, so it came to market with software already available for it

2. It had a complex instruction set compared to the 8080 and the 6502. For me, this was a good thing: early home computers had very little memory, and more complex CPU instructions meant you could have smaller programs (this did make it more expensive to buy initially, and some instructions took many clock cycles to run)

3. It will live on forever in ghostly form: there are a huge number of emulators for it!

4. It also lives on as a 16-bit CPU - link!

So goodbye to one of the great 8-bit CPUs, and thank you for the changes to our lives that you ultimately made possible!

They all used the z80 once.

Whittington, schroeder, broughton, lang, …

More news on this - link:

1. There is a project to make a Z80 clone (this is unlikely to be successful IMO)

2. But in better news, you can still have a chip that behaves like a Z80! An FPGA can be programmed to act like a Z80, and the programming to enable it to do that is available in open source!

You also, as previously stated, can use one of the many available emulators for it.

It's heart-warming to know that, while it will never again be the big thing it once was, it hasn't gone completely either!

I do have a ZX spectrum next go.
That has a z80 with 28 mhz speed. I think it is an FPGA.

I do also have an ultimate Elite 64, a 6502 with 48 mhz.
I think this is also FPGA.

It was big fun to buy a normal c64, disassemble everything into parts, clean it, and implement new motherboard and assemble everything together again.