The Z80 is still manufactured today and I was wondering whether there is any interest for a community or discussion group.
The Z80 is still manufactured today and I was wondering whether there is any interest for a community or discussion group.
I worked at Mostek maintaining the Fairchild Sentry testers used to test the Z80s when they first began to manufacturer them. The second computer I every
built (parts, pcb, solder) was the SDB-80 which was the Mostek Software Development Board for the Z80 with 16K bytes (8 - MK4116 16K bit) dynamic RAMs
which Mostek also made. The first wire wrap board I ever made was a 48K byte dynamic RAM board also using MK4116s that worked with the SDB-80. I can
tell you there were a bunch of happy technicians when we were told that Mostek would be second sourcing the Z-80 and even happier when we were told we
could buy SDB-80 kits and build them ourselves! Those were really fun days. I still have a Zilog Z80 in a ceramic package that says it was manufactured in
Dallas even though Mostek was actually in Carrollton a suburb in Dallas County just north of north-west Dallas.
Wow! that's amazing that you got such a large DRAM board working with Wire-wrap.
Do you still have any photos or schematics of it?
It was quite rare to come across Mostek parts in Australia. We usually got Zilog, SGS and Sharp.
And from memory the SGS parts didn't support the undocumented instructions.