The Z80 was my "first" microprocessor, in an odd way. I've never touched one. It was the early 80s, and my mom was getting Byte Magazine, which I devoured. I h

The Z80 was my "first" microprocessor, in an odd way. I've never touched one. It was the early 80s, and my mom was getting Byte Magazine, which I devoured. I had taken a high school programming class in BASIC, and was interested in electronics. Radio Shack had a shelf of books, and I was going through them one by one as I could afford them. They had William Barden's book on the Z80, published by Howard Sams, because the TRS-80 used it. That book was so clearly and methodically written, that a high school kid could understand it. Later on I added some scraps of inline assembler here and there in programs, but eventually got into microcontrollers, which I continue to play with. I admit that my mental model of microcontrollers is still based on those 8 bit machines, and I owe a debt to the Z80.