Zilog Advert - December 1979

Here's a rare advert from Zilog for its MCZ range of micros - everything from an entry-level floppy-disk-based model up to the MCZ 1/35 rack-mount machine with 10MB storage. The entry-level "low cost" machine retailed at around £4,000, or in the region of £25,700 in 2024.

It was yet another Z80 micro, but that was fair enough as Zilog was the inventor and manufacture of that chip.

Zilog was co-founded in 1974 by Frederico Faggin, who had previously worked at Intel, where he had been involved with the early 4004 and 8008 CPUs and where he would design the influential 8080.

The company's Z80 was released 1976 as a much cheaper, more capable but binary-compatible replacement for this popular Intel chip.

This meant most significantly that the popular business operating-system-of-choice of the day - CP/M - would work without alteration, making Z80-based machines popuplar in the small-business world.

CP/M in turn became known as the de-facto operating system for the Z80, and the two drove each other's success in a closely symbiotic relationship.

The Z80 CPU ended up on machines like the TRS-80, Sinclair's ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum, Amstrad's range of CPC micros, and countless other random boards and micros of the late 70s.

Meanwhile, Zilog spent several years backed by funds from oil behemoth Exxon, but it wasn't until around 1980 that the company actually made any money, even though its Z80 - along with MOS Technology's 6502 - accounted for much of the microcomputer CPU market for the decade between 1975 and 1985.

The name Zilog apparently derived from "Z", meaning the last word (well, letter at least), "I" meaning "integrated" and Log for Logic - hence the "last word in integrated logic"^[1].

As well as that, it was unusual in that the company had its own comic-strip hero - Captain Zilog^[2].