29 Oct
2000
29 Oct
'00
5:52 a.m.
On October 29, ajp166 wrote:
And as the plain ole Z80 as well. The embedded systems world is
crazy about it, using it all over the place. I know a guy (younger
fellow, just out of college, only learned what the college decided to
teach him, very naive) who works for a defense contractor...sent me
email the other day asking if I'd see the neat "NEW" processor called
the Z80. What a great embedded processor it is, he babbled. He was
quite pleased that someone finally came out with a really nice cpu that
had an instruction set that made sense for the embedded world to use.
He just hates the PIC and the 8051. (I don't know what his problem is,
I like 'em both a lot)
I explained that I was running a Z80-based general-purpose computer
fifteen years ago (an IMSAI with a CCS Z80 CPU board which I still
have) as my main machine, and that the Z80 processor was a
general-purpose machine that was very popular in the 70s and 80s...and
was definitely nothing "new".
Know what? HE DIDN'T BELIEVE ME!!
So, yes, folks...the Z80 seems to be gearing up for a second
life...this time as an embedded processor. There are many variations
as Allison stated above, but the standard 40-pin dip that we all
built SBCs out of years ago is at the head of the pack.
Scary. But kinda cool in a way.
-Dave McGuire
the near
future. I'm quite sure nobody is going to hire me to generate
code
for the Z80 or 8080. I've been known to write
code in assembler as
well,
but haven't done anything for hire in about 10
years that has required
Z80
or 8080 coding.
While I understand the desire it's all outside the scope of the original
problem to test and apparently use a bunch of 8085 multibus cards.
Oh, z80 is still out there as Z180, Z380 and Rabbit for embedded
apps and CPU library cores in gate arrays.