Zilog Z80 bites the dust

I had a lot of fun with my Z80 PC, did a lot of software development on it before I upgraded to my first IBM PC clone.

I began programming on a PDP 11 system.

First in Basic and then in assembly language.

Built an awesome temporal image scanner that we used to see missile reticles while they were spinning.

I bought the book and have read it now. Very interesting stuff about the early development of logic chips. I hadn't realised just how manual the process on the first 8080 and Z80 was.

The book is somewhat spoiled by the random AI/philosophical stuff, of which there is far too much - you did warn us !

MK

I felt the same! Also I'm constantly surprised top science and tech journalists have missed out for decades on writing about these subjects for the general reader. Even a kind of 'Bill Bryson' level style for some of the flagship semiconductor stories would be interesting to read, at least anyone could get into that level of explanation, not too deep.

I liked the book Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach although the price is crazy nowadays. A bit too much in-depth, it's not a light read, but that is offset slightly with real-world example chapters, where the author discusses how the theory applied to (say) Pentium, MIPS, etc.

Bob Johnstone is a New Scientist journalist, who writes extremely well, at a popular science level but for engineering topics, I've read several of his books. He seems to consistently do decent research for his books, going out and interviewing the people involved.

Have you read "The Soul Of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder? it won a Pulitzer....

Hi! Yes, great book : ) I only read it a few years ago. Those are the kinds of stories that are missing as books these days it seems.

Although not real, I thought the TV series Halt and Catch Fire was very good. Many episodes of that seemed fairly realistic : ) I thought the success of that would have inspired others to write about the real stories.

I had a Sinclair Scientific calculator, Reverse Polish Notation and all! It was surprisingly accurate compared to other calculators that had more digits and more bits. And it fitted in the top pocket of my jacket.

I've still got it but the on/off switch is worn out now so it doesn't work. A great introduction to electronic arithmetic machines, and a massive leap forwards from log tables!

When last seen my Scientific still had the four conversions/values on the front - pi, e, ln10*, and 1 rad. They have lasted well because I painted a layer of conformal coating over them shortly after arrival.

* the first character is lower-case L, not upper-case I

 shabaz yep I have a few as well plus some of the IOs. But I also have 6800 stuff, and best of all 4 nice AMD2900 (bit-slice) 

 bradfordmiller  S-100 system, yup with a TDL Cpu and the IMSI Front Panel, had a whopping 64M in it. and I had a 100 amp Interdata power supply running the dam thing. but here is the best part I had a KSR35 with a tape reader/punch.. No cassette, plus 4 drives, (disks) It got retired when I picked up a single board 

I suspect you mean 64k :-) I think I had 48k (dynamic) ram, plus a cassette interface that was always blowing out the driver chip, I suspect my cassette recorder was feeding back some voltage under certain circumstances, but I eventually got more serious and bought a couple DSDD 8" floppy drives. I had a lot of fun writing the driver for those. No front panel, though, I was always a bit envious of those with IMSAI machines...

A couple years ago, I grabbed the (big VME bus) 64 kbyte memory board from the trash bin, of a great (old) PLC I had used many times. Traveled the world with that model, TI565.  Back when I had actually programmed the PLC I didn’t know much about hardware. But when I looked at the board that I rescued I realized there is a z80 in the middle of it. It’s in my hardware cabinet, I will have to pull it out.