From: William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> True For production the plan was for bare silicon mounted on hybrids but the silicon itself was large. Of course as production progressed die sizes would have been shrunk but not fast enough. We also used up to 22 layer PCBs! IIRC, samples when they became available would have been DIPs, they were for the Z8001 for sure. We used our own Elliott 920ATC computers to load code into shared RAM before the microprocessor was released from reset. I also wrote a simulator (for the Z8001) for compiler, high level assembler and other utility software development. Unfortunately working at a technical level on the leading edge does not pay very well in the UK. I was told I would not be able to progress to a higher grade without becoming a manager, so I left and became a major shareholder and director of a tiny company and have remained technical to this day. Somewhat to my surprise I found I can still out-program every other programmer we have ever employed despite now being 57 years old.