One of the reasons for this was the fact that there were so many home computers being made with them too .. so you could go to work and hack on the Z80 eval boa

One of the reasons for this was the fact that there were so many home computers being made with them too .. so you could go to work and hack on the Z80 eval board/PCBA, then come home and brush up some code on telly, bring it back on tape and so on .. I made a lot of progress as a programmer in the 80's by building my own suite of home computers with the same CPU's as we were using in embedded projects at work .. Can't really do that much these days, although a similar vibe can be had if you work in embedded linux and use ARM .. pretty nice to take code from an rPi home machine and run it on the industrial systems as well ..