joshbensadon via groups.io wrote:
The "zed 80" was quite a successful processor. It's line up of
peripheral chips made it very much a dream machine. The fact that it
had all these great registers and was backward compatible with the
8080 (mostly) made it a very interesting solution for new and old
systems.
The Z80 was amazing in part because it was such an early microprocessor. It was a huge step ahead of its contemporaries (like the 8080, 6502, 6800, etc.) The others rushed their micros to market; Zilog took more time to get it "right". It's an excellent example of "if you spend just a little more time, you can make it a lot better." That's one reason the Z80 is still produced today; 45 years later!
The features of the Z80 that I really like are:
- simple hardware interface: single 5v supply, simple clock, logical easy-to-use address, data, and control signals.
- included dynamic RAM refresh (important then, less so today).
- rich instruction set: not just the basics, but also relative jumps, 16-bit operations, block moves, indexed addressing, etc.
- plenty of registers, including a duplicate set that can be swapped with a single fast instruction.
- an excellent fast, vectored interrupt structure.
Lee Hart
--
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery
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Lee Hart, 814 8th Ave N, Sartell MN 56377, www.sunrise-ev.com
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Lee Hart