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upstart writes:

An interesting, and very brief, history of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor from the IEEE Computer Society's IEEE Micro magazine:

[...] At the beginning [1974], Faggin intended to develop a single-chip computer (microcontroller), but soon realized that it is difficult to compete in the microcontroller market with a company who has its own semiconductor fabrication facility. [...] Faggin came up with an idea of developing a 5-V microprocessor, which was machine core compatible with then popular Intel 8080, and adding most of the functionalities available in Motorola 6800, so that they could pinch both markets. [...]

Zilog managed to introduce the first working prototype of Z80 on March 9, 1976, created by an 11-member team, exactly on the scheduled date. [...] The developed Z80 microprocessor had an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus with the capability of running all 78 instructions of Intel 8080 and additional instructions. It had 20 × 8-bit registers and 4 × 16-bit registers and could handle up to 64k bytes of memory.

[...] Z80 was very popular as a microprocessor not only in PC applications, but also in industrial embedded applications, and some of the big manufacturers have Z80 core inside their ASIC chips still today or use enhanced versions of Z80 in consumer electronic devices. [...] To this day, Zilog produces a range of Z80-based microprocessors and intelligent peripheral controllers, and they are available from reputed electronics component suppliers. This microprocessor is one of the longest living microprocessors of all time.

Not too shabby for the first product out of a new company. These days it would probably be developed as a Kickstarter.

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