Mark Graybillvintage {Computers | Microprocessors | Microcontrollers}
When Zilog was dominating the micro market with the Z-80, they announced the Z-800, what was going to be a 16 bit microprocessor that would be backward compatible with the Z-80.
It promised the best of both worlds–big databases, faster spreadsheets, and backward compatibility with all the existing software for the Z-80 and 8080, so all those weird little custom apps you had off user group disks would still run.
Unfortunately, the project foundered. Several times, in fact. I don’t know whether the whole story has been told from an inside perspective. If you know of it–a book or interview or whatever, drop a link below.
Instead, we got the non-backward compatible 16/32 bit Z-8000 series. Years after the Z-800 was supposed to appear. It wasn’t a Z-800, but it’s what we got.
There were some systems released for it. CP/M-8000 and Coherent (a commercial Unix clone) ran on it. The Z-8000 wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great, either. After the many years’ wait, Zilog had come out with a disappointment. And the large memory version, the Z8001, was hideously expensive. The smaller memory model Z8002 was priced reasonably, but it was still limited to 4 64K memory spaces, which were for all practical purposes one 64K mixed data/instructions memory space with a 64K RAM disk area.
The Z-80 continued to sell well through this period, becoming the microcontroller of choice for many televisions, especially in the SuperIntegration versions that provided onboard peripherals, so Zilog survived, but the money poured into the Z-800 project turned up nothing in the end.
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