A new era...

Zilog, after having been bought several times, and now owned by Little Fuse, has just announced the end of production of Z80 microprocessors.

The Z80 was introduced in 1976. I remember that year well. I was 10 and it was the summer of the great drought in France. I discovered this processor a few years later, in 1982, when the ZX81 was available in classrooms. It was, and I only realized this a few decades later, too late for me, but this is another story

The Z80 is the circuit that shaped my entire way of thinking about computing. Even today, and even if I work with much more modern and faster circuits, it is my reference circuit. The very example of a computer resource accessible to all, democratic, lending itself to all eccentricities. Unlike the so-called IT of the following decades, which standardized the way of thinking, killed a certain vision of society, destroyed lives by its contribution to the creation of mass unemployment, and finally today, destroyer of human thought.

Reason for which I returned a little over two years ago to machines from the 80s, in this case the MSX standard.

The first MSX computer, th ML-8000 from Mitsubishi

Question: does this announcement of the end of availability of the Z80 signal the end of this craze for the MSX system?

No, obviously. And why? Well quite simply because there are implementations that are either more modern, like the eZ80, still at Zilog, or different, notably within FPGA. I myself had the opportunity to experiment with the implementation of Z80 within FPGA GoWin, during the recreation of the Micro Professor 1 computer. And it works very well.

SO? Well what I 'reproach' to the world of retro-computing is that it is too attached to the 'purism' of retro-computing. Obviously, this attitude can be greatly understood and justified. But, in my eyes, this 'prevents' any attempt to modernize the concept. It is also partly thanks to this that contemporary IT was able to be built, by the obsoletion of the existing, justifying this only by the financial aspect, and not by the real needs on the one hand, and on the other hand, the collaborative aspect of IT rather than the 'large replacement' aspect of a large part of the workers, thereby breaking the Fordian 'tacit contract'.

Today, there are many possibilities to improve the MSX concept, because it is an open system. So, the announced end of an era can, and will I am sure, allow the arrival of a new approach to retro-computing, which will certainly be 'neo-computing'. 

In any case, like the unexpected loss of the feeding bottle to the new born, thus forcing him to move on to childhood, the 'loss' of the Z80, will, I hope, encourage 'retro-computing' to move, therefore, to 'neo computing'.