Rainy sunday afternoon topic: Why Z80?

[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

[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

[XavSnap]

Hi,
The Z80A !!!
Including the RST 10, RST 20 ... Asm functions.