Rainy sunday afternoon topic: Why Z80?

General Chit Chat about Sinclair Computers and their Clones
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VinCBR900
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Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2011 8:21 pm
Location: San Diego, CA, USA

Rainy sunday afternoon topic: Why Z80?

Post by VinCBR900 »

Hi All,
Why did the Sinclair team use the Z80?

The Mk14 used a Scamp, but that had a limited memory model. If the team were motiviated by low cost, then the 6502 was a smaller die and cost less than any competitors when it first came out.

The Sinclair design did not need CP/M compatibility so didnt need the 8080 compatible feature of the Z80.

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Vincent
Last edited by VinCBR900 on Sat Aug 20, 2011 9:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
Moggy
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Joined: Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:00 pm

Re: Rainy sunday afternoon topic: Why Z80?

Post by Moggy »

This Quote from Sinclair electronics design Engineer Brian Flint, concerning the ZX80, gives some idea..

"..I think I’d already done a bit of provisional work testing a membrane keyboard at that point and Sinclair might have already assembled the team of people who were working on the programming language – which a sort of cut-down Basic. It had also been decided that we were going to use a Z80 microprocessor made by Zilog, as that had been around for a year or so. There weren’t many microprocessors around, but they were being made to go in washing machines and anything that did a bit of processing, as is still the case today."

The full interview can be found here.

http://www.polymathperspective.com/?p=408
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XavSnap
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Location: 'Zx81 France' Fb group.

Re: Rainy sunday afternoon topic: Why Z80?

Post by XavSnap »

Hi,
The Z80A !!!
Including the RST 10, RST 20 ... Asm functions.
Xavier ...on the Facebook groupe : "Zx81 France"(fr)
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