Zilog Z8000 Computer

When I was attending the University of Iowa, a couple of fellow students (Mike Higgins, Eric Wedel, Charlie Berger) and I designed and built a custom Z8000 based computer which was used for numeric control in circuit board manufacturing back in the early 80s. Five years later, when it was no longer needed by Wellborn Industries, they were nice enough to send it back to me.

All 4.5" x 6.5" cards were wire-wrapped with on-card voltage regulation.

The hardware was designed by me except for the dynamic RAM card which was designed by Eric Wedel.

All software was written in assembler and burned into 2KB EPROMs.

Construction

All software was written in assembler and burned into 2KB EPROMs.

The software included a BIOS (source) written by me, and a numeric control editor which was written by Charlie Berger.

All development was done on an IBM 370 mainframe at the University of Iowa, using Wylbur timesharing.

The Z8000 assembler was our own and was written by Mike Higgins in IBM 360/370 assembler. It was very efficient and used so little CPU time it could be run in a class S initiator normally only used for print jobs, which meant it always ran immediately.

Mike also wrote a macro pre-processor for his assembler in SNOBOL using SPITBOl. The downside was that SNOBOL used a lot of CPU time so it often had to wait quite a while before it could run. For this reason we didn't always use it.

Also see Hello MAUI, goodnight mainframe, the university's mainframe was powered down for the final time, more than 50 years after the first campus mainframes brought high-performance computing to the UI.

Z8000 publication scans will be posted when I have the time to make the PDFs.