I just heard that after 48 years, the last Zilog Z-80 will roll off the fab this month.
I'm sitting right now in a room full of some of the most advanced high performance computing machinery in the world. On a typical day very fast lasers push 50 gigabytes of data every second through the hair-thin glass fibers behind me, and the soul of a new machine, a nanopore gene sequencer, is being shaped day by day, hour by hour.
Looking back, I am a little awed by how much of last 4+ decades of my life was shaped by the hours I spent as a kid figuring out how to make this little chip work. I got D's and F's in more high-school classes than I can count because I was spending that class time writing Z-80 code in my notebook and hand-assembling it. (A small group of 14 and 15 year old computer-jocks at school eventually pooled their money to buy a Z-80 assembler from Radio Shack.)
It's not an exaggeration to say that the course of my life's path began the day a 14 year old kid discovered the existence of this little chip and began to unravel its mysteries.
The Z-80 was designed by one guy: Federico Faggin. Thanks Federico.