The Z-80 was a great chip to build embedded systems or small controllers with a minimum of H/W. Using some of the swap stack pointer register commands, we figured out a way to call subroutines in Assembly
without using any external RAM.

mark wolfe wrote:

I think I still have "101 Projects for the Z-80" on my shelf...  :)

Mark

Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:

On Jan 9, 2008, at 11:30 PM, Tracy R Reed wrote:

I have long thought it would be cool to build a simple computer out of transistors, vacuum tubes, or relays. Not only for the educational aspects but also for the art of it. And to demonstrate that a computer is not magical. It is a machine just like any other. A very complicated one. But a machine all the same. Transistors themselves almost seem magical so they are out. Vacuum tubes are expensive and potentially failure prone. But relays seem just right. They are mechanical devices that people can understand. Put enough of them together in the right way and you can actually make a semi-useful computing machine.



I have to say, I've always wondered about exactly the same things.

Thanks for pointing this out, I think it's completely awesome, and dispels a lot of mysticism that surrounds the "magic black boxes" that make my computers compute.

Gregory



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