A visitor at the open day of a semiconductor plant in Cupertino in California on a bright spring afternoon, an open palm in a beige corduroy jacket sleeve held toward the lens, on it a single microprocessor, a long black plastic package five centimetres long and one and a half centimetres wide, its top plain smooth matt black and unmarked apart from one small round shallow dimple near one end, twenty bright silver-tinned legs along each side, behind the hand low flat factory buildings of pale concrete with bands of dark windows, a parking lot with large sedans and station wagons in brown, green and cream, young eucalyptus trees, sunlight from the left.
What it was used for
The Z8000 was Zilog's 16-bit microprocessor. According to Steven Leibson's obituary of its architect Bernard Peuto it came in 2 forms: the 40-pin version with a flat 64 kbyte address space and the 48-pin version with segmented 8 Mbyte address spaces; Peuto also designed the Z8010 memory management unit, several of which could work together in one system. In the 2007 CHM panel Peuto names speed, flexible addressing, compiler support and compact code as design goals; Masatoshi Shima says there that it took about 26 months from specification to a working sample.
What was new
The Z8000 was not meant to be a larger Z80. In the CHM panel Federico Faggin says it was "intended to be a real break and an opportunity to do it right", and Peuto describes how the requirements left technically only 1 option: segmentation. The barb: that very decision shut the chip out of the graphics market, says Faggin, the memory management unit came late and development systems were missing - and Faggin calls IBM's choice of Intel the turning point. As guest editor of IEEE Computer in February 1979 Peuto had declared it the "Year of the 16-bit Microprocessor"; it became another processor's year.
What the sources leave open: The souvenir object named in the title could not be identified; the only Z8000 item found in the CHM catalogue is an identification photograph of about 1981, whose reverse also reads "Z80 (r) CPU". The entry therefore describes the processor. On dates: Leibson gives 1979 for the introduction, Faggin in the panel mid-1979 for the first customer samples. No prices or unit numbers.