Italian college student here, we studied the history of Intel and Zylog's first microprocessor in class and it was so awesome to learn that an italian engineer made such a big impact on computers' history!
My grandfather, Richard Moore, was the CTO at Zilog and worked on the Z80 project. He was my best friend and the smartest person I’ve ever met, he was my hero I’m so proud of him n
The Z80 has a MUCH better assembler than the 8080. Both processors are binary compatible (except for all the extended Z80 instructions), but to actually program to the CPU in a sane way, you have to use an assembler software that converts the opcode names to the numbers the CPUs actually understand, and the ZiLOG nomeclature for the instructions etc is a lot better.
@@Cooe. as in the video, ZiLOG was too busy fighting a demon to survive. Also the 8086 assembler is much closer to the Z80 assembler than the insanity that was the 8080.
@@dan_loup Doesn't change the fact that they stood still, and Intel (+ Motorola) leapfrogged them in pretty short order. The Z80 was super important, but Zilog as a whole company was far less so. The definition of a one hit wonder. And it wasn't just Exxon that brought the company down. It was dysfunctional to the core. Absolutely TERRIBLE management.
@@Cooe. Yes, but it's quite unrelated to the fact the 8080 was a mess to program for, while the Z80 was not while they were in essence compatible. I bet late 8080 programmers just used Z80 assemblers and avoided using the Z80 specific instructions
@@Cooe. They didn't stay still. Ever heard of Z-800, Z-8000 and Z-80000 (even Z8 µControllers). Z-8000 was even in some PC (Olivetti M-20) before IBM became the industry standard. History could have been different if IBM wasn't prohibited by Exxon to use Zilog chips.
I never comment on anything but I must say that the tech space on youtube is missing these kinds of videos. I really hope that they're rewarding for you to make. Even if they require significantly more effort to make than normal videos and bring less views, I still think they're extremely worth it in the long term. Keep going!
@@vitalijslebedevs1629 I'm pretty sure he didn't miss them :) , also, RE is making shorts every now and then. Both , and this channel here and some others are so in-depth it's amazing. Of course, more on Exxon could be said, but it must remain watchable and entertaining.
I LOVED routinely writing Z80 code in my head when I was really young. Just the sheer power of the command set was astounding, and with the DRAM hidden refresh built right into the chip make it an even more amzing processor. It's just too bad it took 2 top Intel Engineers to leave and form Zilog only to struggle with making it the incredible processor it was, and has become, from such a smcall company struggling against the big companies. My fellow Italians did it.
Because at the time the culture emphasized the games Go and Shogi during the developmental years. Gives you a different set of thinking tools. Very good games in and of themselves.
I'm not an IT professional, simply someone who was curious when home computers started to become affordable, and I learnt Z80 assembler to get my Sharp MZ700 to do things that BASIC and Pascal wouldn't allow. Insights into Z80 assembler made C easy to learn subsequently. Anyway, the point of my post is that I own an Onxy C8002. It's a Z8002 (yes, 16 bit) based computer which runs Unix and, the last time that I fired it up anyway, is still running. I should probably donate it to a computer museum for the benefit of posterity. Although I'm only a home bodger, I do feel very attached to Zilog, and I loved this. Thank you.
Long time watcher, rare if ever commenter. This new style of video is AWESOME, I know that it has negatively impacted your viewership but they are really well written and beautifully illustrated. I always look forward to your videos :D
I am a big fan of retro technology i also like how the low spec gamer did the video game mods that helped out a lot of people but most of the videos where about the very popular games like fortnite overwatch Minecraft and i don't like those games but they are too popular i was just waiting for him to do something with a rpg game or racing game or something else i am interested in so i think its nice to escape back to the 90s 80s even 70s in this particular video and i always can appreciate it when a youtuber rejects doing the popular thing in favour for something he is interested in it makes me trust him more.
I would just like to add that I only started seeing your videos after you started making documentaries, so at the very least you got the hookup to the discovery channel binge watchers.
First time here, I was thinking the same. Entertaining story telling and the art has a classic humor that makes this very funny and interesting. Keep wondering how did I not know about this before?! Will look forward to more. Definitely earned a sub.
Oh Z80, what a hard processor to use you are. I remember 2 years ago in highschool, my teacher gave us 5 dictionary sized computer and 50 pages of " Zilog Z80 Programming book ". It took us almost an hour just to fix one calculation error.
@@LowSpecGamer My teacher said " Today we have application for programming (IDE). We just type the code and the computer will translate the language and proceeds execute the command. Back then we are the coder and the translator, we have to understand what the computer said and tell them what to do and how to do it."
@JM Coulon I once learned how to do basic programming on the 6502. The 'assembler' was a sheet of paper that you used to translate the op codes to hex that you then entered on a hex keypad. It was pretty basic stuff.
I designed a lot of things with Z80's back in the day - but never knew this story - thank you so much for filling in some of these details I never heard
'twas that little thing that taught me basic, i drew (programmed) my first digital art on it, made my first game and crapped my pants for the first time from c compiler. my blood is full with pure nostalgia juices, right now.
I loved the Z80, and that love was only amplified by the news of the discovery of "hidden" instructions which allowed the two 16-bit X and Y index registers (used as memory pointers) to be used as four 8-bit registers for most purposes. There were a pair of 8-bit registers (H and L) which were designed to be used as a single 16-bit index register for some purposes, and the instructions for dealing with the X and Y index registers were just the instruction for dealing with the HL pair but with a one-byte prefix. It was discovered that adding the X or Y index register prefix to 8-bit H or L instructions would use the High or Low byte of the index register, just as though it was an H or L register. So far as I am aware, all the modern copies of the Z80 (which are still available) have duplicated that functionality.
Yeah this. I programmed the Z-80 as a kid just doing fun stuff. So easy to get into compared with a computer of today. Can't imagine how hard it is to write native MC for a modern computer.
I have a TI85 and 84Plus I picked up for cheap at a garage sale. I prefer HP RPN for use as a calculator, but I'd like to find a decent way to play with Z80 assembler on these things if I can avoid keying in code on the calculator itself.
Fun fact. Federico Faggin comes from the very north of Italy, a whole other kind of Italians (much closer to Austrians), and at the time he moved to the US pizza was unknown there. Being grown up not that far from there, I am not surprised at all by his reaction in Intel and then at Zilog. People from that area, while in general pretty smart, are also incredibly stubborn and with a strong self-reliant self-making mindset. As a side note, the surname should be pronounced Fah-gin, but I don't know if over the time he got used with an americanized version of his surname. Thank you for having brought up this interesting story.
I wrote original assembly language software / firmware for both. From that perspective, the Z80 was hands-down better (and, of course, FAR better than the 8080). I only designed HW for the Z80 (years later), and was impressed with how easy it was to interface, compared to 8088 & 80286, etc... but can't compare the HW of the 6502, as I never designed circuits for it.
I kept waiting for LGR's Clint to make a episode about this for his Tech Tales series back when that was going, but your coverage of these moments in tech history has turned out to be a lot more fun to watch. I look forward to seeing what you'll cover next. :D
I loved programming the Z-80 in assembler, back in the 1980's & 1990's. 256 main instructions + another 256 hidden instructions (CCh & CDh pages). By comparison, it made other processors seem cruse & limited.
The Z80 found its way into various low-cost devices I used, like in a calculator or a PDA. For poor folks, it was an entry into the mighty computer world.
The Z80 also found its way into the PATRIOT Air Defense System radar. The transmitter control unit shrank from two drawers of 71 circuit cards to 1 drawer of 12 cards with a Z80 processor with greatly improved reliability and fault detection.
@@christopheroliver148 I was a principal engineer of a system using 2 z80s that sold for $250,000 in today's money - sold like hotcakes, too... Z80 was state-of-the-art, once. Low-cost devices came quite a bit later.
@@danreitan2506 A Japanese technician, many years ago, said that he and his fellow Japanese nerds made a customized motherboard based on the principle of 0-Raid configuration used in hard drive disks. So they experimented in using that principle with silicon IC micro-chips. They are using the same Z80 silicon IC chips made by a small family owned factory in Japan. Their aim is to create a match to what the Americans are coming up with these days. They showed it to me (that was in 2005) and demonstrated it in front of me with everything exposed in a transparent epoxy case and what Intel is selling those days they are able to match it but this time it is more than 100 times cheaper than the best Intel Desktop Computer and their OS is Linux. Their hand made and hand crafted customized motherboard is rather unusually very large so as to accommodate as many Z80 silicon IC chips and including other chips such as RAM, ROM, USB BUS, GUI, DRAM, etc. All of these events happened 17 years ago and I wonder what happened to them, my good guess is that they started using it only among themselves and with their other fellow Japanese nerds.
There was another competitor to the PC though. Anyone who knows computing knows of the Commodore Amiga. With custom Hardware designed by former Atari Wunderkind Jay Miner, the Amiga, in 1985, could do things that the PC, TEN YEARS LATER, could not. And vice Versa, as the PC used raw Clock-speed to brute-force early low-poly 3D games. But I daresay that the Low Spec Lore team already know this story, and the tale of how early low-poly 3D games could end up running too fast on faster PC hardware. Of the Z80, it apparently made a half-decent sound chip as well, ending up as a secondary sound chip in the Neo-Geo.
The whole story of commodore and their last ditch struggle against the IBM PC is indeed on my radar. You will se me inch closer to that topic as time goes by. I just had to simplify for this video!
> custom Hardware Which was ultimately the downfall of the platform. Only Commodore could build an Amiga, everyone else and their dog could make a PC. Commodore rested on their laurels while the PC folks kept innovating. The 1200 was too little too late, the PC already had moved on. And a PC from ~1995? Sorry but i only need to mention one game here, Quake. Sure, the Amiga was a dream machine in 1985, with a hefty price tag one might add. But then they rest on their laurels and left the platform to rot. And even when Commodore started building PCs their offerings where always a generation behind. Yeah, i love my PC-30 III to bits, but when it came out it was already yesterdays news.
x86 had/has multiple competitor arches over the decades - m68k arch in the '80s and '90s, PPC arch in the '90s and '00s, and even ARM and modern-day IBM Power silicon in present times, like from what I've looked up, Power10 is a beast in the HPC market, for example, as is server/workstation-grade ARM silicon like the Altra and Altra Max series. Even POWER9 (naming scheme changed from Power10 onward) in the Raptor boards is supposedly pretty good.
I always loved the Z80. In 1979 when I was 19, with a friend, we built a full computer around it. I programmed it using an hexadecimal keypad! It was a pure amateur thing, wired with wrapping, which made it difficult to work and even more to reproduce. So only one was built. Because of this, I hated x86. Later, I falled again in love with another microprocessor, Motorola 68000, for its extraordinary instruction set and assembly langage. When I finaly could buy my first TV-connected computer, (a Sinclair QL, built arround a 68008), I wrote an assembler program for it in Basic, which allowed me to run some experimental fun programs. Thank you so much for this Very nice video that reminds me of those early times !
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on x86/64 and ARM nowadays, and were you also 'around' when RISC processors were the Cool New Thing? I wonder if you've actually programmed in assembly for those too. I'm not old enough to have witnessed any of that happen personally, but I've always been extremely curious about the history of computer hardware and funky microarchitectures.
I was about that age too but never experienced the Z80, rather the 6809 when I heavily got into ML (no compiler at all either!) made a sound card for it too. Wish I had kept all those PC boards, would be a good museum piece now. Life is indeed a journey hey?
My company still uses these ancient creatures in it's products. Amazing how it survives to this day, just in products you wouldn't likely expect. Like one that keeps your ice cream frozen in the warehouse ;)
right real time stuff. Or odd niche things like you said no one else is doing. not as galmerous as 40k displays. but hey something or someone has to make other stuff work
Please keep using the Z80 for your walk-in freezer controllers, so it can stay in production for hobbyists to play around with :D I have one with a 2021 date code on it laying on my desk right now!
Amazing episode. And for a good chunk of time I was thinking that the compony was AMD and not Zilog, and then I realized that x86 architecture was not invented in the video yet. Now waiting for the AMD video . . .
They are unlisted. They no longer work and I kept getting messages about them not working/breaking people’s games/doing a “fix” asap, so I unlisted them. It’s not most, just a small group for now.
Goes to show how much of "Free Enterprise" in the USA and in modern economies is actually the result of game theory and legal decisions. For example, in this case, IBM prohibited due to antitrust law from working with Exxon (and thus Zilog) while in telephony, MCI arising out of legal decisions involving AT&T.
@@MrGoatflakes John Von Neumann published his first paper on Game Theory in 1928, during his Tenure at Berlin U. 1928 is also the year John Forbes Nash was Born. In 1944, von Neumann and economist Oscar Morgenstern, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Princeton University, respectively, wrote the landmark book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Though Legend says Neumann actually took part of his insights from early computer theorist from XIX century, like Byron. So it's a chicken-egg paradox to say Nash created the Game Theory.
Little fact, the Z80 is still in production with its original design, only that it is CMOS instead of NMOS. Its the oldest CPU still in production if I'm not wrong and widely used in many many applications as you stated. Also Zilog has some enhanced versions, the eZ80 CPUs and microcontrollers which use the original assembler but include pilelined execution, integrated peripherals, run up to 50Mhz and support up to 16Mb without pagination among other improvements.
@@snorman1911 Nope, there are things like the 65R02 but those are not the same design, they have improvements, differnt instruction sets, etc, but not the original design.
@@drgusman But making a Z80 into CMOS also means the chip design is really different. But indeed it may be logically identical, while those 6502 versions are "improved".
Thank you for the history lesson! I remember working with the IBM 360/370, the Burroughs mainframes during my college years; I still have the IBM 360/370 operators manual! Our Burroughs computer was housed in a 3 story building and had the computing power of 10,000 adding machines; that was impressive. We programmed the machine with a shoebox full of hole punch cards or if you were lucky, using a reel of hole punch tapes. I preferred the cards however because I could exchange a card rather than cut and slice the punch tape reels. Thanks again for the memories.
I met the guy who designed much of the arcade game "Defender". He loved Z80s, even using extra ones for roles that could've been done with a cheaper controller chip, just because Z80s were already familiar.
Dave Williams. I was about 15 when Defender came out... that guy is still a god-level programmer to me. It's been more than 40 years and I can still see the flashing lights and the hypnotizing sounds in the dark environment of the never-before-seen video arcade!
I have a Williams Defender arcade game. It's a brilliant design and uses the Motorola 6809 microprocessor in the main pcb and a 6809 in the sound pcb. I am also a fan of the Z80 and used it in several designs. I visited Zilog in the 70s. While walking past Shima's office I admired his wire wrapped TTL prototype of the Z80 hanging on the wall. I wondered what became of that prototype.
@@Electronix4Dogs Interesting. I didn't know that Defender was also done with 6809's. Maybe the 6809 was a later model, or the designer only used Z80's when he prototyped it. I'm not surprised that it still required multiple processors. It was quite an achievement to make such a fast game. I can hear the sounds in my head now. :-) Thanks also for the Zilog story.
@@jjprulz Not pedantic at all, since the topic is processors. See other comments in this thread. My guess is that he used Z80's in the design stage because it was familiar, but it changed in the production model to save money.
Z80 the chip with that I learned programming. On the wall in the office of my boss was a picture showing him at a university and his teacher Konrad Zuse. It feels strange to me to use a modern computer and still having the knowledge to rebuild this none transistor Z3. To my shame I don't remember much about the book of Charles Babbage he had standing in the shelf. Just joined your channel !
Wow it was really cool to learn the history of Zilog. I work with their chips everyday and always wondered were such an odd name came from. Would like to see you make a video on the history of AMD.
I used z80 based computers for the first 15+ years of my computing until I finally got a 286, and gave up on BASIC and learned pascal, modular 2 and C programming on them, as well as assembler. The only reason I changed was for compatibility with what everyone else was using, so it was a fairly reluctant change. There are still a heck of a lot being made, for use in microcontrollers and other embedded systems, so it almost certainly has had the longest product lifespan of any microprocessor.
As an engineering student I can say that we still study the intel 8086 chip as an introduction to microprocessor design. it felt great learning the history of the chip.
I learned Z80 assembly when I was 12 from a book written for kids. It had a cartoon character with eight-fingered hands for 8 bit registers, and sixteen toes on each of his feet for the IX and IY registers.
@@alexsinclair2012 I think Jason is misdescribing it a bit, the book did have a couple of illustrations - but was not primarily a kid's picture book: _Spectrum Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner_ ed: William Tang is available in pdf from retro8bitcomputers
Cool story, I never imagined there was this interesting history behind the Z80, I knew it existed cause when playing on Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulators, you found options to configure the emulation of the Z80 microprocessor on the settings, so yeah, the Sega console used one of those processors, thanks for letting us know how this story happened
Sega used the Z80 as the Master System's CPU and as the Genesis's sound chip if I remember correctly. I'm slightly surprised that Nintendo didn't also use the Z80 for the Famicom and NES since _Donkey Kong_ both in the arcade cabinet and on the ColecoVision ran on that processor, but I suppose the greater efficiency of the 6502 compelled Nintendo to use Ricoh's 6502 clone instead.
Great video. I designed telecom test systems with the Mostek version of the Z80 starting in 1980. Great chip. The big thing too was that when the Motorola and Intel development systems were worth $10K, Zilog’s was worth 4K with a single 8” floppy and an Emulator. The 8080 had different instruction for memory and I/O operations. The Z80 would allow you to hardware map I/O and memory together so you could do arithmetic and memory type operations direct on I/O. The 6800 did this. I still have a hand full of them. Thanks again for the memories.
"Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms." A processor that lasted 48 years. Amazing!!!!
Don't mind me, just doing my part, commenting and liking the video, I imagine this change of style will be problematic for metric, but this is good content.
Well kinda, but not exactly, Z80 wasn't really running on X86 and well Intel was trying their best in 2002-2008 to kill off every single company that could compete in X86 space, which basically pushed VIA out of the mainstream market and almost destroyed AMD.
Legally they were required by IBM to license to second source suppliers the 8086 chip. AMD and VIA were the first two companies to receive those licenses. Intel sued AMD because they made a 586 clone and thought there licensing prevented that. Apparently the original licensing for the base chip gave AMD the Rights to build on the platform forever as long as they paid Intel.
@@JeffreyPiatt It was a 386, and a damned good one. By 586, Intel changed the name to Pentium , which could be copyrighted, unlike 486, 386 etc. Despite Intel keeping AMD in litigation for a year or so, the latter's CPU came out on top and still managed to make a dent in Intel's sales. There was no CPU labelled as a 586, indirectly perhaps the Cx586 or the AMD 5x86.
So, I absolutely adore these animations,.. did not expect it did not realize that they were custom at first cuz I had this in the background and I couldn't get around to watching it for a few hours on account of antics today.. but since I've restarted it and started in about 20,000 times at this point they never fail to impress me and just the production values in general considering the pivot and everything.. super cool, definitely a step above what many of these things end up being.. like clearly separation from the crowd in this case.. it's it's nice to have a project to work on that you actually enjoy and it's really cool to see you maximize that.. certainly didn't expect the interview in the second one and just all in all this thing has kind of made my day LOL.. also kind of glad I watched the second one first because I didn't have the first pronunciation burned into my brain, as far as it is to say either way lol.. that poor guy.. still keep thinking about that in high school in the 60s LOL.
I LOVE learning computer history! This video taught me quite bit. I never knew Exxon tried to get in the processor game. You just gained a new subscriber today! I look forward to watching your other videos!
My man. I was initially very dejected by your decision to abandon the old lowspec types of videos, but these video essays have been fantastic, I've rewatched each several times. The delivery, writing, stories picked, and the art styles are all fantastic. Keep it up!!!
This is the first time I've seen one of your videos. I'm really impressed. The TH-cam algorithm actually did a good job for once after recommending you over some time now. Excited to see more!
In October 1987 I bought a Cambridge (Sinclair) Z88 mini computer that was built on the Z80 chip. It's the A4 sized one with the LCD screen along the top and a bunch of software apps built in, called PipeDream. I was studying for my PhD at the time. When the Z88 came out I scrounged together enough money to buy the computer, charger, extended RAM etc, about 380 English pounds. I wrote a lot of my PhD thesis on that little computer with it's short screen that showed only five or six lines at a time. I used to record supervisor meetings on a little tape recorder and type them up on the Z88 traveling on the train from London back to Exeter in the west. For the final write-up I got funding for a 286 PC and transferred everything over to that. I still have the Z88, and taped inside the back cover of the handbook are the original receipts. It's like my own personal time capsule and still works after 35 years.
I've learnt my first English translating the Z80 assembly manual in Italian. Many years later I still have a lot to learn, both in English and programming. Nice video, thanks for uploading!
Great watch. I hope to see a follow another one on how Microsoft almost lost, when IBM had the opportunity to buy them, instead choosing to compete with their OS/2, which was miles better than Windows but the hardware requirements were too high and expensive for most prospective users.
Well this is definitely next level for you. Please don't give up on this new format. I haven't watched anything from you in some time but these are interesting and well narrated. You might lose viewers in the short term, but I think you will gain a new audience with these types of videos. I'm already looking forward to watching the rest of them. BTW, the algorithm brought me back here. I wish you the best. I was always super curious about what happened to Zilog. This definitely answers my questions.
The Z-80 will always have a spot in my heart. That thing was so underappreciated in it's day. The 6502 took the "cheap processor" crown, and Intel had the market share to ruin Zilog. But the Z-80 was better than the 8080. If not for IBM, i wonder what Zilog would have come up with. If CPM had dominated instead of MS-DOS (Which was pretty much a rip off of CPM), then the world might be very different today, computationally. Which is why tech geniuses need a business man to make it work. CPM? Could have been the OS for the original IBM PC, but no. The writer of CPM didn't understand business, and dissed IBM, which was not kosher. So IBM went to MS, which at the point was a computer language writer, not an OS writer. But MS looked at CPM, and thought, "we could do the same thing, but not copy the code." And they did, and the rest is history. But if you know MS-DOS you can use a CPM machine, because the OS is basically the same from a UI aspect. And since the UI WAS the OS at that point, as the commands were pretty basic.
Z-80 processors are still used today, in things like vending machines and other devices that need semi powerful processing. They got the core to 50mhz and 1cycle per instruction on most instructions and can have a boat load of memory. Saying that it seems like everyone has moved to some type of ARM based core for even simple jobs that a 40 year old microcontroller would do fine at... Everyone writes in C now, so no need to learn the CORE anymore and let the compiler handle deal with that.
@@johnjay6370 Yep. I have seen microcontrollers based on a Z-80 core with the eeprom, ram, and i/o built in. Used in a lot of places where you need or want the flexibility of a couple, but it needs to be cheap. A lot of these are single or double chip designs. Cuts cost of manufacturing down tremendously.
@@johnjay6370 I was writing in C for the Z80 for embedded applications. Toshiba made a nice version with all the peripheral chips built in. However ROM space was getting to be cramped, I could have done with a larger address space.
Yeezzz, CP/M was awful. MS-DOS started out as a copy, certainly, but they rapidly improved the system beyond CP/M, which had *fun things* like not knowing exactly where the end of file was, completely flat directory structure, etc.
We used to love playing with the mistakes in the Z80 where instructions do something almost right. Go through the instruction set, spot the patterns and try the opcodes in the blank spaces. It really felt like a pair of 8080s with the stack pointer and program counter repurposed as the IX and IY index registers.. i learnt programming with that CPU back about 1979.
Damn Alex, your recent work has just been so well polished, conquering multiple niches in a span of few years. Might have to get Nebula, just to watch your content!
Between the single supply, single clock, and integrated (if simplistic) support for DRAM the Z80 really was set to dominate the market. Shame about corporate politics ruining everyone's fun.
I remember the introduction of the Z80 and built a homebrew computer around it's architecture after building one around the Intel 8008. The Z80 was the best CPU available at that time. It was sad to witness it's demise.
Amazing video, and fascinating. I clicked on it because the it looked vaguely interesting, did not expect something so well written, narrated, and animated. Loved it.
It is amazing to know that if Exxon did not get their fingers on the Z80, the current cpu of choice perhaps would not be an Intel, but a Zilog. I was curious at what happened to Zilog.
The Z80 invented prefix bytes. The Z80 added some registers and when you use them you just put a prefix byte before the instruction. E.g. putting a 0xDD byte means the instruction will use IX instead of HL, 0xFD means use IY instead of HL. The 8086 uses prefix bytes for segment overrides, lock and repeated instructions. These were a bit of a nightmare to decode when the superscalar era started but, according to Jim Keller, on a modern chip you just use prediction to guess the instruction boundaries. Right now on x64 instructions are 1-15 bytes long.
4 years ago I was thaught z80 in highschool, I had been told that the artitecture was superior to the 8086 and that it is a shame that intel won the war. This year in university I was thaught 8086 and I perfectly understand the sentiment my highschool professor had.
Dici così perché non hai mai visto MC68k, dalla cui architettura Atmel ha attinto a piene mani per fare il miglior microcontrollore mai realizzato. E poi dovresti studiarti l'architettura ARM e il suo incredibile bus AMBA, così scopriresti che x86, Z80 e MC68k sono, oltre che preistoria, niente di che.
I have been an interpreter in silicon valley since 1982, and the omly name in this video I have heard of is Ungermann. This is very interesting stuff. because I remember Fairchild being in the center of silicon valley one day, and all of a sudden it was gone. Also being half Japanese , I never heard of any Mr. Shima. I will do some research on this. But just seeing the name "Zilog" was a moment down memory lane. Also the scene of placing 10 inch wafers into boats manually brought back memories. (They were 4 inch at that time) Pre-Lam laboratory times. Actually I started from quartz made boats for CVD. Maybe 30 wafers per boat. Yeild rate maybe 50%. They were the times. Fabs not foundries for U.S. and Japan.
It amazes me how many accidental variables were involved in the creation of the IBM PC. They could've gone with Zilog, as this video described. They were also looking at using Digital Research their CP/M operating system for the PC, but they couldn't get a date picked out to sit down and discuss the intricacies of the deal. (DR were essentially ran by a husband and wife duo from their own house and had very little staff while IBM were a massive company.) So instead IBM was approached by Microsoft who claimed to have a CP/M compatible OS and they were ready to show it off on a very short timescale. Microsoft then bought someone's CP/M clone, renamed it to MS-DOS and impressed IBM enough to make the deal that would establish their dominance for the next 40 years. If things had gone even a little different then we'd all be using DR made software right now running on a Zilog based architecture. Or maybe the whole thing would've never gotten anywhere and we'd all be using Amiga OS or something like that. One can only wonder.
Thank you for the history lesson here. I hope CEOs eventually took it to heart. For me, the biggest jump I experienced was when the Core2 Duo came out. Holy shit, it was miles better than the P4. It's basically been iterations since that one.
Excellent video, my dude. I’m just surprised TH-cam didn’t freak out over you saying Federico’s surname repeatedly, as they demonetized Justin Whang a while back because of his surname also sounding like a colloquial term for a man’s private bits, though thankfully he was able to get it overturned.
Sorry, I think I mentioned on my video last year but I honestly don´t have it on me to make videos like that anymore. th-cam.com/video/gAUqCvi4z5s/w-d-xo.html The Steam Deck is a great example. What can I possibly add that has not been said before by every channel that got one? I literally have nothing else to add that I have not seen on a Steam Deck video already!
Incredible video!!! I never knew about this and I'll probably forever mourn the loss of Zilog as a competitor in the market (Also, the art and storytelling in general are incredibly well done!!!)
I cut my teeth on assembly for the Z80 in a ZX Spectrum. Love the chip. Kudos for getting the details in the drawings spot on, like actual Z80 assembly code in 16:50.
As an assembly programmer on mainframes, I built my own computer that mimicked the mainframe instruction set. It worked great! I used BPS as the o/s, and I discovered CP/M and rebuilt my computer using the Z80. Canned the whole thing and adopted the S-100 bus with 64k of memory!. I wrote hundreds of applications on the Z-80 under CP/M. There was even a mainframe emulator too! I still have my S-100 bus computer and my very portable Kaypro-10! To me the x86 instruction set is braindead! The mainframe instruction set was much better, but IBM could never supply enough chips on thier own. In addition the PC was part if the GSD part of IBM as they saw the PC as a toy. So it was put under the same division of IBM that made typewriters, word processors, and photocopiers.
I have fond memories of the Z80! It was the processor my Dad used for a couple of his projects. It's fascinating to see the business dynamics of this that I was unaware of at the time.
I loved that the z80 had two sets of context. I was able to run a real time measurement tool in one context and a non real time supervisor in the other. I barely had time for the real time code. Not saving the register in and out really helped.
Ah, I remember it well, all those late nights and trembling hands from too much coffee writing Z80A assembly on paper, pages and pages of it , mind so frazzled I had to use a calculator to work out the 16 bit addresses for jumps in the code, and I was so poor I couldn't afford an assembler so I'd just poke the code in, byte by byte....intellectually it was some of the most satisfying stuff I ever did as a teenager...I wrote a few games, defender type ones, I even wrote a Morse code decoder/encoder...and even wrote an improved tape loading routine that was faster than the original one that was in the ROM on my ZX Spectrum...then later I discovered beer and women and, that was the end of that .
I'm from Vicenza and i did the same high school as Federico (ITIS A.Rossi). He is so devoted to that school he's used to have a conference in it every couple of years (where i managed to meet him in person). He is a very nice guy and probably the most inspiring figure i could ever encounter.
LOVE WRITING CODE FOR THE Z80, I like the amount of registers and it just seemed to make more sense than the 6503. I really enjoyed this video, I got really nostalgic. The story of the Z80 is sadly a typical tale of how a big corporation ruins ingenuity. I had two 48K spectrums and one 128K (which sadly went nowhere. I taught myself Z80 machine can de and write two games for the spectrum but sadly neither were published. The first was written while I was still learning and took forever, when it was finished several other games shared the same idea but were way better than mine. (Starquake by Steve Crow being the best. The second game I wrote was way better and quite unique but memory constraints hampered it but when the 128K came out I thought this was it, sadly not to be. Laser genius assembler and debugger were the best in my opinion but there was another that I can’t remember the name of. There was another computer that never made the market called the enterprise, it ran on a Z80, my friend was a test programmer for the company. Anyway, I now live in America and still have my spectrums. I sometimes think of getting them going again but they were from the UK, and I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Japanese boss: [shouts at employee]
Italian worker: [shouts back]
Japanese boss: "Wait, you can do that?"
yes cause i am the boss
Italian college student here, we studied the history of Intel and Zylog's first microprocessor in class and it was so awesome to learn that an italian engineer made such a big impact on computers' history!
Dude the months we use around the world are named after your emperors. Chad Italy
Have you ever heard of Olivetti? Check out the story 😉
As an American in computer science for 10+ years I didn’t know about this until I watched this video.
boia de
Genpan, is that part of the general curriculum for Italian schools or does college mean the American type in your statement?
My grandfather, Richard Moore, was the CTO at Zilog and worked on the Z80 project. He was my best friend and the smartest person I’ve ever met, he was my hero I’m so proud of him n
The Z80 has a MUCH better assembler than the 8080.
Both processors are binary compatible (except for all the extended Z80 instructions), but to actually program to the CPU in a sane way, you have to use an assembler software that converts the opcode names to the numbers the CPUs actually understand, and the ZiLOG nomeclature for the instructions etc is a lot better.
The Z80 was better than the 8080 sure, but it got absolutely ROFLSTOMPED by the 8086. Zilog stood still while Intel kept pushing.
@@Cooe. as in the video, ZiLOG was too busy fighting a demon to survive.
Also the 8086 assembler is much closer to the Z80 assembler than the insanity that was the 8080.
@@dan_loup Doesn't change the fact that they stood still, and Intel (+ Motorola) leapfrogged them in pretty short order. The Z80 was super important, but Zilog as a whole company was far less so. The definition of a one hit wonder. And it wasn't just Exxon that brought the company down. It was dysfunctional to the core. Absolutely TERRIBLE management.
@@Cooe. Yes, but it's quite unrelated to the fact the 8080 was a mess to program for, while the Z80 was not while they were in essence compatible.
I bet late 8080 programmers just used Z80 assemblers and avoided using the Z80 specific instructions
@@Cooe. They didn't stay still. Ever heard of Z-800, Z-8000 and Z-80000 (even Z8 µControllers). Z-8000 was even in some PC (Olivetti M-20) before IBM became the industry standard. History could have been different if IBM wasn't prohibited by Exxon to use Zilog chips.
I never comment on anything but I must say that the tech space on youtube is missing these kinds of videos. I really hope that they're rewarding for you to make. Even if they require significantly more effort to make than normal videos and bring less views, I still think they're extremely worth it in the long term. Keep going!
You should check out Technology Connections and Real Engineering among others.
@@vitalijslebedevs1629 I'm pretty sure he didn't miss them :) , also, RE is making shorts every now and then. Both , and this channel here and some others are so in-depth it's amazing. Of course, more on Exxon could be said, but it must remain watchable and entertaining.
A guy who can run the entire process logic in his head is a brilliant man. It's not impossible but it requires a lot of thinking power.
I wonder if he ate more, on lunch and dinner...
It's pure genius and detailed experience. Power of imagination.
I LOVED routinely writing Z80 code in my head when I was really young. Just the sheer power of the command set was astounding, and with the DRAM hidden refresh built right into the chip make it an even more amzing processor. It's just too bad it took 2 top Intel Engineers to leave and form Zilog only to struggle with making it the incredible processor it was, and has become, from such a smcall company struggling against the big companies. My fellow Italians did it.
Because at the time the culture emphasized the games Go and Shogi during the developmental years. Gives you a different set of thinking tools. Very good games in and of themselves.
@@abizair1832 He ate large amounts white rice likely, carbohydrates in it are good for your brain
I'm not an IT professional, simply someone who was curious when home computers started to become affordable, and I learnt Z80 assembler to get my Sharp MZ700 to do things that BASIC and Pascal wouldn't allow. Insights into Z80 assembler made C easy to learn subsequently. Anyway, the point of my post is that I own an Onxy C8002. It's a Z8002 (yes, 16 bit) based computer which runs Unix and, the last time that I fired it up anyway, is still running.
I should probably donate it to a computer museum for the benefit of posterity.
Although I'm only a home bodger, I do feel very attached to Zilog, and I loved this. Thank you.
Long time watcher, rare if ever commenter. This new style of video is AWESOME, I know that it has negatively impacted your viewership but they are really well written and beautifully illustrated. I always look forward to your videos :D
Agreed. I miss the low-spec builds, but this LowSpecGamer has really found his niche. Every episode he comes out with has been thoroughly engrossing.
I am a big fan of retro technology i also like how the low spec gamer did the video game mods that helped out a lot of people but most of the videos where about the very popular games like fortnite overwatch Minecraft and i don't like those games but they are too popular i was just waiting for him to do something with a rpg game or racing game or something else i am interested in so i think its nice to escape back to the 90s 80s even 70s in this particular video and i always can appreciate it when a youtuber rejects doing the popular thing in favour for something he is interested in it makes me trust him more.
I would just like to add that I only started seeing your videos after you started making documentaries, so at the very least you got the hookup to the discovery channel binge watchers.
Second channel to vlog your gaming related interests? If you have a steam deck i want to see what you play
First time here, I was thinking the same. Entertaining story telling and the art has a classic humor that makes this very funny and interesting. Keep wondering how did I not know about this before?! Will look forward to more. Definitely earned a sub.
Oh Z80, what a hard processor to use you are. I remember 2 years ago in highschool, my teacher gave us 5 dictionary sized computer and 50 pages of " Zilog Z80 Programming book ". It took us almost an hour just to fix one calculation error.
Ironically, it was considered simple to use at the time!
@@LowSpecGamer My teacher said " Today we have application for programming (IDE). We just type the code and the computer will translate the language and proceeds execute the command. Back then we are the coder and the translator, we have to understand what the computer said and tell them what to do and how to do it."
It's actually quite simple to use, it's just that you need to first learn how those processors work.
Huh, personally I took an extreme liking to z80 assembly.
I picked it up quite fast.
@JM Coulon I once learned how to do basic programming on the 6502. The 'assembler' was a sheet of paper that you used to translate the op codes to hex that you then entered on a hex keypad. It was pretty basic stuff.
I designed a lot of things with Z80's back in the day - but never knew this story - thank you so much for filling in some of these details I never heard
Oh hell yeah. Huge fan of this chip. The z80 is iconic.
'twas that little thing that taught me basic, i drew (programmed) my first digital art on it, made my first game and crapped my pants for the first time from c compiler.
my blood is full with pure nostalgia juices, right now.
The one processor I at times dream of.
I loved the Z80, and that love was only amplified by the news of the discovery of "hidden" instructions which allowed the two 16-bit X and Y index registers (used as memory pointers) to be used as four 8-bit registers for most purposes.
There were a pair of 8-bit registers (H and L) which were designed to be used as a single 16-bit index register for some purposes, and the instructions for dealing with the X and Y index registers were just the instruction for dealing with the HL pair but with a one-byte prefix. It was discovered that adding the X or Y index register prefix to 8-bit H or L instructions would use the High or Low byte of the index register, just as though it was an H or L register.
So far as I am aware, all the modern copies of the Z80 (which are still available) have duplicated that functionality.
YES, look at the register set of the z80
I remember doing machine code programming for the Z80 ... I can't imagine doing it with the latest processors
Yeah this. I programmed the Z-80 as a kid just doing fun stuff. So easy to get into compared with a computer of today. Can't imagine how hard it is to write native MC for a modern computer.
Like riding a bike. 😉
I remember programming in z80 assembly on my TI-83 Plus back in high school. Good times.
Used to program assembly on an 83 myself. Not a plus. I must be older than you lol. Good times.
@@armyofninjas9055 Not a plus? I thought only the Plus was able to be programmed. But I only ever used BASIC
I have a TI85 and 84Plus I picked up for cheap at a garage sale. I prefer HP RPN for use as a calculator, but I'd like to find a decent way to play with Z80 assembler on these things if I can avoid keying in code on the calculator itself.
@@christopheroliver148 At least for BASIC, you can use the 84+ USB port to load files from a computer
I used a Sinclair ZX81 myself. Programmed in machine code and BASIC.
Fun fact. Federico Faggin comes from the very north of Italy, a whole other kind of Italians (much closer to Austrians), and at the time he moved to the US pizza was unknown there. Being grown up not that far from there, I am not surprised at all by his reaction in Intel and then at Zilog. People from that area, while in general pretty smart, are also incredibly stubborn and with a strong self-reliant self-making mindset. As a side note, the surname should be pronounced Fah-gin, but I don't know if over the time he got used with an americanized version of his surname.
Thank you for having brought up this interesting story.
Actually the question of what sort of culture shock he went through is very interesting.
To me, the real head to head for 8-bit supremacy was always Z80 vs MOS 6502. The real "tiny" GIANTS of that era.
I wrote original assembly language software / firmware for both. From that perspective, the Z80 was hands-down better (and, of course, FAR better than the 8080). I only designed HW for the Z80 (years later), and was impressed with how easy it was to interface, compared to 8088 & 80286, etc... but can't compare the HW of the 6502, as I never designed circuits for it.
And you can still buy them last time i checked.
Yes, you can still buy them both!
@@danreitan2506 Your replies are very informative! Thanks!
Did you ever experience the eZ80 line of uControllers?
@@retromodernart4426 no, but did we not all use them like ucontrollers?
I kept waiting for LGR's Clint to make a episode about this for his Tech Tales series back when that was going, but your coverage of these moments in tech history has turned out to be a lot more fun to watch. I look forward to seeing what you'll cover next. :D
Recently I discovered the channel "RetroBytes", you might like to watch it.
I loved programming the Z-80 in assembler, back in the 1980's & 1990's. 256 main instructions + another 256 hidden instructions (CCh & CDh pages). By comparison, it made other processors seem cruse & limited.
The Z80 found its way into various low-cost devices I used, like in a calculator or a PDA. For poor folks, it was an entry into the mighty computer world.
And earlier it was in expensive micros too. The KayPro II sold for the equivalent of $5000US today. Scary.
The Z80 also found its way into the PATRIOT Air Defense System radar. The transmitter control unit shrank from two drawers of 71 circuit cards to 1 drawer of 12 cards with a Z80 processor with greatly improved reliability and fault detection.
@@johncasteel1780 also used in lots of gaming machines, probably still. seen it in many surprising things.
@@christopheroliver148 I was a principal engineer of a system using 2 z80s that sold for $250,000 in today's money - sold like hotcakes, too... Z80 was state-of-the-art, once. Low-cost devices came quite a bit later.
@@danreitan2506 A Japanese technician, many years ago, said that he and his fellow Japanese nerds made a customized motherboard based on the principle of 0-Raid configuration used in hard drive disks. So they experimented in using that principle with silicon IC micro-chips. They are using the same Z80 silicon IC chips made by a small family owned factory in Japan. Their aim is to create a match to what the Americans are coming up with these days. They showed it to me (that was in 2005) and demonstrated it in front of me with everything exposed in a transparent epoxy case and what Intel is selling those days they are able to match it but this time it is more than 100 times cheaper than the best Intel Desktop Computer and their OS is Linux. Their hand made and hand crafted customized motherboard is rather unusually very large so as to accommodate as many Z80 silicon IC chips and including other chips such as RAM, ROM, USB BUS, GUI, DRAM, etc. All of these events happened 17 years ago and I wonder what happened to them, my good guess is that they started using it only among themselves and with their other fellow Japanese nerds.
There was another competitor to the PC though. Anyone who knows computing knows of the Commodore Amiga. With custom Hardware designed by former Atari Wunderkind Jay Miner, the Amiga, in 1985, could do things that the PC, TEN YEARS LATER, could not. And vice Versa, as the PC used raw Clock-speed to brute-force early low-poly 3D games. But I daresay that the Low Spec Lore team already know this story, and the tale of how early low-poly 3D games could end up running too fast on faster PC hardware.
Of the Z80, it apparently made a half-decent sound chip as well, ending up as a secondary sound chip in the Neo-Geo.
The whole story of commodore and their last ditch struggle against the IBM PC is indeed on my radar. You will se me inch closer to that topic as time goes by. I just had to simplify for this video!
The z80 was also used in the DAC for the sega genesis iirc
> custom Hardware
Which was ultimately the downfall of the platform. Only Commodore could build an Amiga, everyone else and their dog could make a PC. Commodore rested on their laurels while the PC folks kept innovating. The 1200 was too little too late, the PC already had moved on. And a PC from ~1995? Sorry but i only need to mention one game here, Quake.
Sure, the Amiga was a dream machine in 1985, with a hefty price tag one might add. But then they rest on their laurels and left the platform to rot. And even when Commodore started building PCs their offerings where always a generation behind.
Yeah, i love my PC-30 III to bits, but when it came out it was already yesterdays news.
x86 had/has multiple competitor arches over the decades - m68k arch in the '80s and '90s, PPC arch in the '90s and '00s, and even ARM and modern-day IBM Power silicon in present times, like from what I've looked up, Power10 is a beast in the HPC market, for example, as is server/workstation-grade ARM silicon like the Altra and Altra Max series. Even POWER9 (naming scheme changed from Power10 onward) in the Raptor boards is supposedly pretty good.
Isn't the Amiga kind of the exact opposite of low-spec gaming? ;-)
I always loved the Z80. In 1979 when I was 19, with a friend, we built a full computer around it. I programmed it using an hexadecimal keypad! It was a pure amateur thing, wired with wrapping, which made it difficult to work and even more to reproduce. So only one was built. Because of this, I hated x86. Later, I falled again in love with another microprocessor, Motorola 68000, for its extraordinary instruction set and assembly langage. When I finaly could buy my first TV-connected computer, (a Sinclair QL, built arround a 68008), I wrote an assembler program for it in Basic, which allowed me to run some experimental fun programs. Thank you so much for this Very nice video that reminds me of those early times !
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on x86/64 and ARM nowadays, and were you also 'around' when RISC processors were the Cool New Thing? I wonder if you've actually programmed in assembly for those too. I'm not old enough to have witnessed any of that happen personally, but I've always been extremely curious about the history of computer hardware and funky microarchitectures.
I was about that age too but never experienced the Z80, rather the 6809 when I heavily got into ML (no compiler at all either!) made a sound card for it too. Wish I had kept all those PC boards, would be a good museum piece now. Life is indeed a journey hey?
My company still uses these ancient creatures in it's products. Amazing how it survives to this day, just in products you wouldn't likely expect. Like one that keeps your ice cream frozen in the warehouse ;)
What was a mainstream processor is now an microcontroller. (Well it probably got some on chip peripherals glue on over the years.)
right real time stuff. Or odd niche things like you said no one else is doing. not as galmerous as 40k displays. but hey something or someone has to make other stuff work
Please keep using the Z80 for your walk-in freezer controllers, so it can stay in production for hobbyists to play around with :D I have one with a 2021 date code on it laying on my desk right now!
I was on the edge of my seat watching this. Such a good presentation. Such great story telling. You're good at this, Alex!
Amazing episode. And for a good chunk of time I was thinking that the compony was AMD and not Zilog, and then I realized that x86 architecture was not invented in the video yet. Now waiting for the AMD video . . .
Zilog was AMD before AMD existed!
*company
They are unlisted. They no longer work and I kept getting messages about them not working/breaking people’s games/doing a “fix” asap, so I unlisted them.
It’s not most, just a small group for now.
There is a playlist with all of them!
3DFX was the first graphic card realeased .
I STILL HAVE MINE
Goes to show how much of "Free Enterprise" in the USA and in modern economies is actually the result of game theory and legal decisions. For example, in this case, IBM prohibited due to antitrust law from working with Exxon (and thus Zilog) while in telephony, MCI arising out of legal decisions involving AT&T.
what wait? Are u referring to Von Neumann's theory?
Is that related?
@@victor_silva6142 Nash invented game theory, not von Neumann.
Wait until I tell the story of how the IBM antitrust actually led to the success of Microsoft and Windows
@@MrGoatflakes John Von Neumann published his first paper on Game Theory in 1928, during his Tenure at Berlin U. 1928 is also the year John Forbes Nash was Born. In 1944, von Neumann and economist Oscar Morgenstern, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Princeton University, respectively, wrote the landmark book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Though Legend says Neumann actually took part of his insights from early computer theorist from XIX century, like Byron.
So it's a chicken-egg paradox to say Nash created the Game Theory.
@@victor_silva6142well I learned something today ☺️
Little fact, the Z80 is still in production with its original design, only that it is CMOS instead of NMOS. Its the oldest CPU still in production if I'm not wrong and widely used in many many applications as you stated.
Also Zilog has some enhanced versions, the eZ80 CPUs and microcontrollers which use the original assembler but include pilelined execution, integrated peripherals, run up to 50Mhz and support up to 16Mb without pagination among other improvements.
The 6502 is still in production, I think that beats it.
@@snorman1911 Nope, there are things like the 65R02 but those are not the same design, they have improvements, differnt instruction sets, etc, but not the original design.
@@ButterfatFarms well, yes, it shows how well designed it was that even after nearly 50 years its original design is in use without changes.
@@ButterfatFarms 🫡🫡🫡 ✋✋✋
@@drgusman But making a Z80 into CMOS also means the chip design is really different.
But indeed it may be logically identical, while those 6502 versions are "improved".
Thank you for the history lesson! I remember working with the IBM 360/370, the Burroughs mainframes during my college years; I still have the IBM 360/370 operators manual! Our Burroughs computer was housed in a 3 story building and had the computing power of 10,000 adding machines; that was impressive. We programmed the machine with a shoebox full of hole punch cards or if you were lucky, using a reel of hole punch tapes. I preferred the cards however because I could exchange a card rather than cut and slice the punch tape reels. Thanks again for the memories.
I met the guy who designed much of the arcade game "Defender". He loved Z80s, even using extra ones for roles that could've been done with a cheaper controller chip, just because Z80s were already familiar.
Dave Williams. I was about 15 when Defender came out... that guy is still a god-level programmer to me.
It's been more than 40 years and I can still see the flashing lights and the hypnotizing sounds in the dark environment of the never-before-seen video arcade!
I have a Williams Defender arcade game. It's a brilliant design and uses the Motorola 6809 microprocessor in the main pcb and a 6809 in the sound pcb. I am also a fan of the Z80 and used it in several designs. I visited Zilog in the 70s. While walking past Shima's office I admired his wire wrapped TTL prototype of the Z80 hanging on the wall. I wondered what became of that prototype.
@@Electronix4Dogs Interesting. I didn't know that Defender was also done with 6809's. Maybe the 6809 was a later model, or the designer only used Z80's when he prototyped it. I'm not surprised that it still required multiple processors. It was quite an achievement to make such a fast game. I can hear the sounds in my head now. :-) Thanks also for the Zilog story.
If I may be pedantic... Defender didn't use the Z80. It used a 6809 and 6800.
@@jjprulz Not pedantic at all, since the topic is processors. See other comments in this thread. My guess is that he used Z80's in the design stage because it was familiar, but it changed in the production model to save money.
These videos just keep getting better and better, your presentation style is so good!
Z80 the chip with that I learned programming. On the wall in the office of my boss was a picture showing him at a university and his teacher Konrad Zuse. It feels strange to me to use a modern computer and still having the knowledge to rebuild this none transistor Z3. To my shame I don't remember much about the book of Charles Babbage he had standing in the shelf.
Just joined your channel !
The Z80 was the first processor I wrote programs for. It may be old now but it's still a great processor and will always have a place in my heart. 🙂
У меня был золотой керамический made in ussr Z80 ))
Wow it was really cool to learn the history of Zilog. I work with their chips everyday and always wondered were such an odd name came from. Would like to see you make a video on the history of AMD.
I used z80 based computers for the first 15+ years of my computing until I finally got a 286, and gave up on BASIC and learned pascal, modular 2 and C programming on them, as well as assembler.
The only reason I changed was for compatibility with what everyone else was using, so it was a fairly reluctant change.
There are still a heck of a lot being made, for use in microcontrollers and other embedded systems, so it almost certainly has had the longest product lifespan of any microprocessor.
Honestly I'm far more interested in your new videos than in the old ones. Looking forward for the next one!
As an engineering student I can say that we still study the intel 8086 chip as an introduction to microprocessor design. it felt great learning the history of the chip.
I love these kinds of videos. A brief history of our favorite tech
I learned Z80 assembly when I was 12 from a book written for kids. It had a cartoon character with eight-fingered hands for 8 bit registers, and sixteen toes on each of his feet for the IX and IY registers.
WOW, can i have a link to that book plz? seems like a really effective way of learning through memorable illustrations...
@@alexsinclair2012 I think Jason is misdescribing it a bit, the book did have a couple of illustrations - but was not primarily a kid's picture book: _Spectrum Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner_ ed: William Tang is available in pdf from retro8bitcomputers
Cool story, I never imagined there was this interesting history behind the Z80, I knew it existed cause when playing on Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulators, you found options to configure the emulation of the Z80 microprocessor on the settings, so yeah, the Sega console used one of those processors, thanks for letting us know how this story happened
Sega used the Z80 as the Master System's CPU and as the Genesis's sound chip if I remember correctly. I'm slightly surprised that Nintendo didn't also use the Z80 for the Famicom and NES since _Donkey Kong_ both in the arcade cabinet and on the ColecoVision ran on that processor, but I suppose the greater efficiency of the 6502 compelled Nintendo to use Ricoh's 6502 clone instead.
Great video. I designed telecom test systems with the Mostek version of the Z80 starting in 1980. Great chip. The big thing too was that when the Motorola and Intel development systems were worth $10K, Zilog’s was worth 4K with a single 8” floppy and an Emulator. The 8080 had different instruction for memory and I/O operations. The Z80 would allow you to hardware map I/O and memory together so you could do arithmetic and memory type operations direct on I/O. The 6800 did this. I still have a hand full of them. Thanks again for the memories.
These videos manage to maintain that difficult balance of being informative AND entertaining. Thanks for making all of these!
"Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms."
A processor that lasted 48 years. Amazing!!!!
Your design and animation on characters is always amazing! I love it
Don't mind me, just doing my part, commenting and liking the video, I imagine this change of style will be problematic for metric, but this is good content.
Amazing video! :thumbsup:
If Exxon didn't ruin Zilog, we could have had 3 brands of processors to choose from!
Well kinda, but not exactly, Z80 wasn't really running on X86 and well Intel was trying their best in 2002-2008 to kill off every single company that could compete in X86 space, which basically pushed VIA out of the mainstream market and almost destroyed AMD.
You had more than that, there was the 8080, Z80, 6502, 6800, and more. Each had its fans. And that is just the 8 bit club.
We had Cyrix, TI, and a few others in the 90s.
Legally they were required by IBM to license to second source suppliers the 8086 chip. AMD and VIA were the first two companies to receive those licenses. Intel sued AMD because they made a 586 clone and thought there licensing prevented that. Apparently the original licensing for the base chip gave AMD the Rights to build on the platform forever as long as they paid Intel.
@@JeffreyPiatt It was a 386, and a damned good one. By 586, Intel changed the name to Pentium , which could be copyrighted, unlike 486, 386 etc. Despite Intel keeping AMD in litigation for a year or so, the latter's CPU came out on top and still managed to make a dent in Intel's sales.
There was no CPU labelled as a 586, indirectly perhaps the Cx586 or the AMD 5x86.
So, I absolutely adore these animations,.. did not expect it did not realize that they were custom at first cuz I had this in the background and I couldn't get around to watching it for a few hours on account of antics today.. but since I've restarted it and started in about 20,000 times at this point they never fail to impress me and just the production values in general considering the pivot and everything.. super cool, definitely a step above what many of these things end up being.. like clearly separation from the crowd in this case.. it's it's nice to have a project to work on that you actually enjoy and it's really cool to see you maximize that.. certainly didn't expect the interview in the second one and just all in all this thing has kind of made my day LOL.. also kind of glad I watched the second one first because I didn't have the first pronunciation burned into my brain, as far as it is to say either way lol.. that poor guy.. still keep thinking about that in high school in the 60s LOL.
I LOVE learning computer history! This video taught me quite bit. I never knew Exxon tried to get in the processor game.
You just gained a new subscriber today! I look forward to watching your other videos!
My man. I was initially very dejected by your decision to abandon the old lowspec types of videos, but these video essays have been fantastic, I've rewatched each several times. The delivery, writing, stories picked, and the art styles are all fantastic.
Keep it up!!!
As always, this was REALLY well told
This is the first time I've seen one of your videos. I'm really impressed. The TH-cam algorithm actually did a good job for once after recommending you over some time now.
Excited to see more!
hell yeah, i'm so glad to see new content from you! i love the previous lowspeclore videos you made and this one is no exception!
In October 1987 I bought a Cambridge (Sinclair) Z88 mini computer that was built on the Z80 chip. It's the A4 sized one with the LCD screen along the top and a bunch of software apps built in, called PipeDream. I was studying for my PhD at the time. When the Z88 came out I scrounged together enough money to buy the computer, charger, extended RAM etc, about 380 English pounds. I wrote a lot of my PhD thesis on that little computer with it's short screen that showed only five or six lines at a time. I used to record supervisor meetings on a little tape recorder and type them up on the Z88 traveling on the train from London back to Exeter in the west. For the final write-up I got funding for a 286 PC and transferred everything over to that. I still have the Z88, and taped inside the back cover of the handbook are the original receipts. It's like my own personal time capsule and still works after 35 years.
I absolutely love the new format of the videos ! Your narration, content and animation is great ! Thanks for blessing us with these videos !
I've learnt my first English translating the Z80 assembly manual in Italian.
Many years later I still have a lot to learn, both in English and programming.
Nice video, thanks for uploading!
Great watch. I hope to see a follow another one on how Microsoft almost lost, when IBM had the opportunity to buy them, instead choosing to compete with their OS/2, which was miles better than Windows but the hardware requirements were too high and expensive for most prospective users.
Well this is definitely next level for you. Please don't give up on this new format. I haven't watched anything from you in some time but these are interesting and well narrated. You might lose viewers in the short term, but I think you will gain a new audience with these types of videos. I'm already looking forward to watching the rest of them. BTW, the algorithm brought me back here. I wish you the best.
I was always super curious about what happened to Zilog. This definitely answers my questions.
The Z-80 will always have a spot in my heart. That thing was so underappreciated in it's day. The 6502 took the "cheap processor" crown, and Intel had the market share to ruin Zilog.
But the Z-80 was better than the 8080. If not for IBM, i wonder what Zilog would have come up with. If CPM had dominated instead of MS-DOS (Which was pretty much a rip off of CPM), then the world might be very different today, computationally.
Which is why tech geniuses need a business man to make it work. CPM? Could have been the OS for the original IBM PC, but no. The writer of CPM didn't understand business, and dissed IBM, which was not kosher. So IBM went to MS, which at the point was a computer language writer, not an OS writer.
But MS looked at CPM, and thought, "we could do the same thing, but not copy the code." And they did, and the rest is history. But if you know MS-DOS you can use a CPM machine, because the OS is basically the same from a UI aspect. And since the UI WAS the OS at that point, as the commands were pretty basic.
Z-80 processors are still used today, in things like vending machines and other devices that need semi powerful processing. They got the core to 50mhz and 1cycle per instruction on most instructions and can have a boat load of memory. Saying that it seems like everyone has moved to some type of ARM based core for even simple jobs that a 40 year old microcontroller would do fine at... Everyone writes in C now, so no need to learn the CORE anymore and let the compiler handle deal with that.
@@johnjay6370 Yep. I have seen microcontrollers based on a Z-80 core with the eeprom, ram, and i/o built in.
Used in a lot of places where you need or want the flexibility of a couple, but it needs to be cheap. A lot of these are single or double chip designs. Cuts cost of manufacturing down tremendously.
@@johnjay6370 I was writing in C for the Z80 for embedded applications. Toshiba made a nice version with all the peripheral chips built in. However ROM space was getting to be cramped, I could have done with a larger address space.
Yeezzz, CP/M was awful. MS-DOS started out as a copy, certainly, but they rapidly improved the system beyond CP/M, which had *fun things* like not knowing exactly where the end of file was, completely flat directory structure, etc.
We can see what they would’ve made, by looking at the ez80, a funny little 24 bit chip. Super cool cpu
We used to love playing with the mistakes in the Z80 where instructions do something almost right. Go through the instruction set, spot the patterns and try the opcodes in the blank spaces. It really felt like a pair of 8080s with the stack pointer and program counter repurposed as the IX and IY index registers.. i learnt programming with that CPU back about 1979.
I loved the Z80! It had a powerful set of instructions for an 8-bit processor.
Damn Alex, your recent work has just been so well polished, conquering multiple niches in a span of few years. Might have to get Nebula, just to watch your content!
Between the single supply, single clock, and integrated (if simplistic) support for DRAM the Z80 really was set to dominate the market. Shame about corporate politics ruining everyone's fun.
I remember the introduction of the Z80 and built a homebrew computer around it's architecture after building one around the Intel 8008. The Z80 was the best CPU available at that time. It was sad to witness it's demise.
This video series is awesome. Love the drawings/animations
Amazing video, and fascinating. I clicked on it because the it looked vaguely interesting, did not expect something so well written, narrated, and animated. Loved it.
It is amazing to know that if Exxon did not get their fingers on the Z80, the current cpu of choice perhaps would not be an Intel, but a Zilog. I was curious at what happened to Zilog.
The Z80 invented prefix bytes. The Z80 added some registers and when you use them you just put a prefix byte before the instruction. E.g. putting a 0xDD byte means the instruction will use IX instead of HL, 0xFD means use IY instead of HL. The 8086 uses prefix bytes for segment overrides, lock and repeated instructions. These were a bit of a nightmare to decode when the superscalar era started but, according to Jim Keller, on a modern chip you just use prediction to guess the instruction boundaries. Right now on x64 instructions are 1-15 bytes long.
man I used to hate computer architecture classes, these videos could have helped in making me interested in them lol
Great video! The full story can be read in Federico Faggin's book "Silicon" which came out in 2021 on Amazon. Thanks for making this!
4 years ago I was thaught z80 in highschool, I had been told that the artitecture was superior to the 8086 and that it is a shame that intel won the war.
This year in university I was thaught 8086 and I perfectly understand the sentiment my highschool professor had.
Dici così perché non hai mai visto MC68k, dalla cui architettura Atmel ha attinto a piene mani per fare il miglior microcontrollore mai realizzato. E poi dovresti studiarti l'architettura ARM e il suo incredibile bus AMBA, così scopriresti che x86, Z80 e MC68k sono, oltre che preistoria, niente di che.
@@hansroemerszoonvanderbrikk7626 arm lo devo studiare per l'esame del 6 giugno quindi ti saprò dire presto
@@Praisethefab divertiti 🤣
@@hansroemerszoonvanderbrikk7626 preferisco riscV grazie, nonostante l'ARM generico che ho fatto io lo preferisco a intel.
@@hansroemerszoonvanderbrikk7626 z80 non me lo ricordo abbastanza da poterlo comparare
I have been an interpreter in silicon valley since 1982, and the omly name in this video I have heard of is Ungermann. This is very interesting stuff. because I remember Fairchild being in the center of silicon valley one day, and all of a sudden it was gone. Also being half Japanese , I never heard of any Mr. Shima. I will do some research on this.
But just seeing the name "Zilog" was a moment down memory lane.
Also the scene of placing 10 inch wafers into boats manually brought back memories. (They were 4 inch at that time) Pre-Lam laboratory times.
Actually I started from quartz made boats for CVD. Maybe 30 wafers per boat. Yeild rate maybe 50%.
They were the times.
Fabs not foundries for U.S. and Japan.
It amazes me how many accidental variables were involved in the creation of the IBM PC. They could've gone with Zilog, as this video described. They were also looking at using Digital Research their CP/M operating system for the PC, but they couldn't get a date picked out to sit down and discuss the intricacies of the deal. (DR were essentially ran by a husband and wife duo from their own house and had very little staff while IBM were a massive company.) So instead IBM was approached by Microsoft who claimed to have a CP/M compatible OS and they were ready to show it off on a very short timescale.
Microsoft then bought someone's CP/M clone, renamed it to MS-DOS and impressed IBM enough to make the deal that would establish their dominance for the next 40 years. If things had gone even a little different then we'd all be using DR made software right now running on a Zilog based architecture. Or maybe the whole thing would've never gotten anywhere and we'd all be using Amiga OS or something like that. One can only wonder.
Was IBM impressed by Microsoft's quick action, or to their ability to shamelessly rip off a vendor, Seattle computer products? Probably both...
@@scottfranco1962 Nah, Bill Gates mom was on IBM's board. She literally recommended her son's company to IBM. And Bill grabbed it with both hands.
@@akshaymathur136 myth.
Thank you for the history lesson here. I hope CEOs eventually took it to heart. For me, the biggest jump I experienced was when the Core2 Duo came out. Holy shit, it was miles better than the P4. It's basically been iterations since that one.
Long time no see 🙌
Wow, so glad I found your channel. The drawings are the best part!
Man, most of the stories are show worthy
I really try to tell the good ones
Excellent video, my dude. I’m just surprised TH-cam didn’t freak out over you saying Federico’s surname repeatedly, as they demonetized Justin Whang a while back because of his surname also sounding like a colloquial term for a man’s private bits, though thankfully he was able to get it overturned.
Laughing out loud at the FF7 Shinra music at 12:49
This narrator is great, his mastery of the English language is unmatched. I have but one question though, what is a "sirkwit"?
What happens when you say it coming from Spanish.
@@LowSpecGamer Ahhh, now mi comprende, Senor. Mi Ingles es perfecto, but mi Espanol es muey mal. Me hablo Espanol un piquito. PEACE.
Make a video on new ryzen and stream deck plz
Sorry, I think I mentioned on my video last year but I honestly don´t have it on me to make videos like that anymore. th-cam.com/video/gAUqCvi4z5s/w-d-xo.html
The Steam Deck is a great example. What can I possibly add that has not been said before by every channel that got one? I literally have nothing else to add that I have not seen on a Steam Deck video already!
@@LowSpecGamer I really used to admire and follow your tech coverage someone for the low end but no problem alex hope u get success this way too
Incredible video!!! I never knew about this and I'll probably forever mourn the loss of Zilog as a competitor in the market
(Also, the art and storytelling in general are incredibly well done!!!)
I was about to head to bed but not so much now
I rewatch your micro processor videos a few times a year. Think you for the great content!
These new videos on older chips are fantastic and I'm loving them. Well done!
Crazy good video. I can see why your channel blew up so fast!
I cut my teeth on assembly for the Z80 in a ZX Spectrum. Love the chip.
Kudos for getting the details in the drawings spot on, like actual Z80 assembly code in 16:50.
Ha! I am glad someone noticed.
As an assembly programmer on mainframes, I built my own computer that mimicked the mainframe instruction set. It worked great! I used BPS as the o/s, and I discovered CP/M and rebuilt my computer using the Z80. Canned the whole thing and adopted the S-100 bus with 64k of memory!. I wrote hundreds of applications on the Z-80 under CP/M. There was even a mainframe emulator too! I still have my S-100 bus computer and my very portable Kaypro-10!
To me the x86 instruction set is braindead! The mainframe instruction set was much better, but IBM could never supply enough chips on thier own.
In addition the PC was part if the GSD part of IBM as they saw the PC as a toy. So it was put under the same division of IBM that made typewriters, word processors, and photocopiers.
Just came from RealEngineering's shout out. Subscribed at "but they hadn't met Italians." Very interesting and entertaining! Great work!
I have fond memories of the Z80! It was the processor my Dad used for a couple of his projects. It's fascinating to see the business dynamics of this that I was unaware of at the time.
I like the new format. Your voice and the story is perfect. I still miss old content but this gold i really love!
This style of video and hearing about the history of all these companies is actually very engaging
I loved that the z80 had two sets of context. I was able to run a real time measurement tool in one context and a non real time supervisor in the other. I barely had time for the real time code. Not saving the register in and out really helped.
Thanks for taking me back to my roots. Many hours writing z80 code and wirewrapping prototypes.
These new videos are so well made :D I am glad you are taking a new approach you enjoy!
You’re on curiosity stream? I’ll re-sign up, this was very well done!
Ah, I remember it well, all those late nights and trembling hands from too much coffee writing Z80A assembly on paper, pages and pages of it , mind so frazzled I had to use a calculator to work out the 16 bit addresses for jumps in the code, and I was so poor I couldn't afford an assembler so I'd just poke the code in, byte by byte....intellectually it was some of the most satisfying stuff I ever did as a teenager...I wrote a few games, defender type ones, I even wrote a Morse code decoder/encoder...and even wrote an improved tape loading routine that was faster than the original one that was in the ROM on my ZX Spectrum...then later I discovered beer and women and, that was the end of that .
New Subscriber From Birmingham England
Bless Up
Thank you for fixing the thumbnail - it's been bothering me for almost a month!
I'm from Vicenza and i did the same high school as Federico (ITIS A.Rossi). He is so devoted to that school he's used to have a conference in it every couple of years (where i managed to meet him in person). He is a very nice guy and probably the most inspiring figure i could ever encounter.
LOVE WRITING CODE FOR THE Z80, I like the amount of registers and it just seemed to make more sense than the 6503. I really enjoyed this video, I got really nostalgic. The story of the Z80 is sadly a typical tale of how a big corporation ruins ingenuity.
I had two 48K spectrums and one 128K (which sadly went nowhere. I taught myself Z80 machine can de and write two games for the spectrum but sadly neither were published. The first was written while I was still learning and took forever, when it was finished several other games shared the same idea but were way better than mine. (Starquake by Steve Crow being the best. The second game I wrote was way better and quite unique but memory constraints hampered it but when the 128K came out I thought this was it, sadly not to be. Laser genius assembler and debugger were the best in my opinion but there was another that I can’t remember the name of. There was another computer that never made the market called the enterprise, it ran on a Z80, my friend was a test programmer for the company.
Anyway, I now live in America and still have my spectrums. I sometimes think of getting them going again but they were from the UK, and I’m not sure it’s worth it.
loved the z80 I built ciarsias computer in the 1980s while at college
Thanks a lot. I wrote programs for Zilog 80A in 1980s. The CP/M operating system. Basic, Fortran and Assembler at last.
shoutout to the DEC Rainbow 100, the cursed PC-(not)Compatible that had both an 8088 and a Z80
These videos just keep getting better! You are on a roll!