Chip off the old block

Standalone sales of the Z80 CPU have finally been discontinued after 48 years. David Crookes looks back on a chip with a staggering impact

When you consider the list of machines that have made use of Zilog’s Z80 microprocessor chip, it reads like a computing equivalent of Who’s Who. Having burst onto the tech scene on the back of a 1976 advert that pitted the Z80 squarely against Intel’s 8080A in a so-called “Battle of the 80s”, Zilog’s single chip ended up being used in Sinclair’s ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Amstrad’s CPC and PCW ranges, the TRS-80, the Osborne-1, a host of early Sega consoles and many more machines besides. You’ll find it in the Amstrad NC-100 and NC-200, the TRS-800 Model 100 and Sinclair’s Cambridge Z88. You’ll spot it inside graphing calculators made by Texas Instruments and Amstrad’s ill-fated E-mailer telephone. There was a Zilog Z80 chip inside the Commodore 128, which allowed…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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