I paste that into the search box and cannot see the post here. The administrator's avatar is a picrew furry with red streaks in its hair. I click on the link and there are people that I will never talk to having a conversation about chips. They not only would not willingly have a conversation with me, but if they heard that you were having a conversation with me, they would not talk to you. I look at what they are saying and how they are saying it and I cannot relate to them. Every message I try to read in the thread has a "content warning" and I have to click "Show More". One of them has the opinion that a fun chip should "die"; I've heard what these people have to say about me. I click a couple of the other ones. They're listing their opinions, and I don't really have a personal relationship with them so I don't wonder what they think, and they use a grating cadence that reminds me of work emails written by a middle manager that wants to sound fun, or a corporate Twitter account. People that hate me and want to prevent me from reading their posts do not like a thing that I think is fun, and they require a lot of clicking on "Show More", so the thread can't even be skimmed, and their writing isn't even entertaining.
It was a depressing link to click on; even the sadposters around here seem upbeat by comparison: the sadposters are young and they are figuring things out and sometimes that makes you feel aimless and depressed on top of the usual nonsense that comes with being alive that they are not yet accustomed to. These people, though, are bitter, and are hating on chips that cannot affect them any more, they have spent most of the words in their bio on what sort of people they hate and the other half on rules that you must follow to interact with them. They have walled themselves off from the "bad" people and they think this is some sort of punishment rather than a mercy.
> To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.
I do have some loose Z80s, Zilog's logo and everything, but I didn't have a Z80-based computer per se; I have spent a lot of time with the Game Boy, though. The Game Boy and the Game Gear and the NES (6502) and the ubiquitous TI-83 and a very large proportion of the arcade games. The Z80 also appeared in the Texas Instruments graphing calculators that basically every kid in the country used. It was as ubiquitous then as the ARM is now.
The Z80, 6502, 8080, and the custom chips in the game consoles, those overlap significantly, just a handful of instructions different, almost all binary-compatible, so it's a piece of computing history, one of these pieces of technology that were so widespread that they have come to represent an era, like the DEC VT100 or MS-DOS on an 8086.
And anyway, not just that, but the instruction set is basically all you need for Forth. If you sit down and do a Forth, you can really feel it, this clunky chip opens all the way up.
@p Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing. To be honest, to me it's in the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical 😅 As for Z80: https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111 To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.
@p > Forth environment on a Z-80 That shit I came up with was somewhat hard to challenge, but you did! Respect! 😂 I'm just poking @iska for fun — pretty sure that it would be something more practical (but still unusable by the standards of a normal human being) @realman543
> What did you expect, giant distributed microkernel-based LISP machine running exclusively on NUMA-enabled Itanium cores?
I may as well douse my computer in gasoline, unplug all the fans, and sacrifice my eyebrows so that I can huff the rare-earth minerals for enlightenment.
I'm more likely to boot to a Forth environment on a Z-80 than a microkernel LISP on an Itanic. One of those brings with it the promise of at some point performing I/O.