Perhaps the saddest thing about the Zilog Z80 is that this humble 8-bit microprocessor wasn’t allowed to live until its 50th birthday. This, fortunately, doesn’t prevent people like [David Oberhollenzer] from reminiscing on this influential processor and what it means to them personally.
First released in July of 1976, this humble 8-bit miracle would go on to power not just a range of home computers, but also be found in everything from industrial controllers to arcade systems. Despite this success, the new owner of Zilog — Littelfuse — decided to put an end to this winning streak in 2024 for the stand-alone processor and its peripherals.
Although the original Z80 ecosystem ceased production, this didn’t prevent hobbyists from creating new operating systems for it, let alone entire new development toolchains, or demonstrate multitasking on the Z80.
Meanwhile, the Z80 architecture is still very much alive and kicking, such as in the form of the eZ80 SoC in the TI 84+ CE calculator that [grubbycoder] ported Sonic 2 from the Z80-based Sega Master System.
Among all of this modern-day Z80 goodness, we also have a few gems from the past to admire, such as the OS that Zilog made for this architecture in the form of Z80-RIO, which was sadly not as successful as the hardware.