Remembering the Zilog Z80 as it Turns Fifty Years Old

The Zilog Z80, released in July of nineteen seventy-six, just turned fifty—though it didn't quite make it under its original timeline. Per Hackaday, Littelfuse, which now owns Zilog, discontinued the eight-bit processor in twenty twenty-four. But the hobbyist community had other plans. Enthusiasts have since built new operating systems, development toolchains, and multitasking implementations to keep the Z80 alive. The architecture persists in modern hardware too: it lives inside the Texas Instruments eighty-four plus CE calculator, where programmers have ported games like Sonic 2 to the eZ80 variant. Half a century after its debut, the Z80 has become the foundation of a thriving retro-computing community.

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