Intel’s worst Nightmare

Japanese boss: [shouts at employee] Italian worker: [shouts back] Japanese boss: "Wait, you can do that?"

Italian college student here, we studied the history of Intel and Zylog's first microprocessor in class and it was so awesome to learn that an italian engineer made such a big impact on computers' history!

My grandfather, Richard Moore, was the CTO at Zilog and worked on the Z80 project. He was my best friend and the smartest person I’ve ever met, he was my hero I’m so proud of him n

The Z80 has a MUCH better assembler than the 8080. Both processors are binary compatible (except for all the extended Z80 instructions), but to actually program to the CPU in a sane way, you have to use an assembler software that converts the opcode names to the numbers the CPUs actually understand, and the ZiLOG nomeclature for the instructions etc is a lot better.

I never comment on anything but I must say that the tech space on youtube is missing these kinds of videos. I really hope that they're rewarding for you to make. Even if they require significantly more effort to make than normal videos and bring less views, I still think they're extremely worth it in the long term. Keep going!

A guy who can run the entire process logic in his head is a brilliant man. It's not impossible but it requires a lot of thinking power.

Long time watcher, rare if ever commenter. This new style of video is AWESOME, I know that it has negatively impacted your viewership but they are really well written and beautifully illustrated. I always look forward to your videos :D

I'm not an IT professional, simply someone who was curious when home computers started to become affordable, and I learnt Z80 assembler to get my Sharp MZ700 to do things that BASIC and Pascal wouldn't allow. Insights into Z80 assembler made C easy to learn subsequently. Anyway, the point of my post is that I own an Onxy C8002. It's a Z8002 (yes, 16 bit) based computer which runs Unix and, the last time that I fired it up anyway, is still running. I should probably donate it to a computer museum for the benefit of posterity. Although I'm only a home bodger, I do feel very attached to Zilog, and I loved this. Thank you.

Oh Z80, what a hard processor to use you are. I remember 2 years ago in highschool, my teacher gave us 5 dictionary sized computer and 50 pages of " Zilog Z80 Programming book ". It took us almost an hour just to fix one calculation error.

I remember doing machine code programming for the Z80 ... I can't imagine doing it with the latest processors

I designed a lot of things with Z80's back in the day - but never knew this story - thank you so much for filling in some of these details I never heard

I remember programming in z80 assembly on my TI-83 Plus back in high school. Good times.

Amazing episode. And for a good chunk of time I was thinking that the compony was AMD and not Zilog, and then I realized that x86 architecture was not invented in the video yet. Now waiting for the AMD video . . .

Oh hell yeah. Huge fan of this chip. The z80 is iconic.

I kept waiting for LGR's Clint to make a episode about this for his Tech Tales series back when that was going, but your coverage of these moments in tech history has turned out to be a lot more fun to watch. I look forward to seeing what you'll cover next. :D

The Z80 found its way into various low-cost devices I used, like in a calculator or a PDA. For poor folks, it was an entry into the mighty computer world.

To me, the real head to head for 8-bit supremacy was always Z80 vs MOS 6502. The real "tiny" GIANTS of that era.

I loved programming the Z-80 in assembler, back in the 1980's & 1990's. 256 main instructions + another 256 hidden instructions (CCh & CDh pages). By comparison, it made other processors seem cruse & limited.

There was another competitor to the PC though. Anyone who knows computing knows of the Commodore Amiga. With custom Hardware designed by former Atari Wunderkind Jay Miner, the Amiga, in 1985, could do things that the PC, TEN YEARS LATER, could not. And vice Versa, as the PC used raw Clock-speed to brute-force early low-poly 3D games. But I daresay that the Low Spec Lore team already know this story, and the tale of how early low-poly 3D games could end up running too fast on faster PC hardware. Of the Z80, it apparently made a half-decent sound chip as well, ending up as a secondary sound chip in the Neo-Geo.

I was on the edge of my seat watching this. Such a good presentation. Such great story telling. You're good at this, Alex!