> The Z80 was officially launched in July 1976.[17] One of the first customers was a buyer who, unknown to Zilog, worked for NEC. At the time, the Japanese electronics companies were well known for taking US chip designs and producing them without a license. The Zilog team had worried about this, and Faggin had come up with the idea of adding transistors that would be subtly modified to operate differently than a visual inspection would suggest. Shima added six of these "traps" around the design. Sometime later, Shima was told by an engineer within NEC that the traps had delayed their copying efforts by six months.[18]
From article:
> In July 1976 the Z80 went on sale. One of Zilog's very first customers was a buyer who, unbeknownst to them, worked for NEC.
> The Zilog team had worried about the trend of Japanese companies making and selling unauthorized clones of American components and Faggin had come up with the idea of adding subtle "trap" transistors that would fool a visual inspection. Shima's previous experience with NEC minicomputers had led him to add the concept of two sets of processor registers to the Z80 and agreed with Faggin's concerns and added six traps to the design. As revealed in the excellent oral history of Zilog, Shima was told by an NEC engineer that the traps had delayed NEC's copying efforts by around six months.
Seems possibly AI generated. Also article is just littered with so many ads that you're better off reading the wiki entry.
1.) We missed a digit when adding in the number for inflation. It was a mispaste. (We had $112, the actual number was $1127.) We will correct this. Our apologies.
2.) Matt pulled from a similar source (the oral history of the Z80), which may reflect some of the similarity in ordering. That said, you are correct, and is a bit too similar for my liking. We are going to make some changes on this section and will make a note on this front. I should note though that this article has many more elements to it than this one passage, and discusses a wide array of topics.
3.) There are three ads on the entire page for a 2,000+-word article. It’s a newsletter, so one is embedded in the article as a sponsorship. The other two are from BuySellAds, and are otherwise minimal. I encourage you to compare that to the number currently on this random article I just pulled from Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/extreme-heat-solar-energy-clean-energy-s...
As far as your “AI generated” claim: That is incredibly rude. Please, read the rest of our articles and tell me where we generate AI. I appreciate your criticism up to the point about the AI generation. That is not fair to Matt, it is not fair to myself as his editor, and it is not the way I want this website perceived.
Please, do not bandy around such claims like that offhand. It harms independent publishers that are actually doing the work.
Don’t blame on bots what can be better blamed on humans trying their best to get it right and stumbling a little.
Glad to hear it's not AI-generated. The inflation number being lower instead of higher was extremely odd and AI is generally bad at math. The paragraph mentioned was very close to the Wikipedia entry in sequence.
After seeing that, I stopped reading shortly after and decided to just read the Wikipedia entry instead.
Re: the ads - they blend too much into the article that it was hard to distinguish between an ad and not which is probably why it felt like there were many ads. Sorry about that. You're right, after spending time discerning between an ad section and image there aren't many ads at all.
An awful lot of the Z80 Wikipedia article seems to be taken from oral history transcript.
I hope you’ll read the whole thing as there’s a lot more to it than that and I asked a number of people for their personal history with the chip and I’ve been using a Z80-based machine for most of my life so there’s a lot of personal history in there too.
You may be reacting to the fact that the actual content is broken out into numbers and quotes—that is a house style of ours, and we’ve used it for many years.
More broadly, I would encourage you to be careful about claiming things are AI-generated vs. not. You perhaps saw it as a minor thing. I did not.
It is a bad time for actual writers and editors and is seen as a claim of impropriety in media circles. It threatens our work. I reacted strongly to it because, honestly, being seen seriously is a real point of concern.
It does. Sorry, I didn't realize my claims would carry such impact. I definitely want to support the work of creatives and will be much more careful from now on.
And although the Z80 was popular, that $200 cost was non-trivial. Probably the whole reason the 8-bit world was split between the Z80 and the 6502 was that the 6502 was much cheaper.
About the Z80 pricing, in 1981 I was able to buy a Z80A and two PIO chips for $3 each in Brazil (lots of taxes). Some of the larger TTL chips (like bidirectional buffers) cost more than that, so when a group asked me to design a CP/M computer in 1984 I actually added extra Z80s (to generate video and for the two GPIB interfaces) to save TTLs.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadThat doesn't sound right... AI generated?
Also one part of the article seems to be a rewording of a paragraph in the wikipedia article for the Z80:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
From wiki:
> The Z80 was officially launched in July 1976.[17] One of the first customers was a buyer who, unknown to Zilog, worked for NEC. At the time, the Japanese electronics companies were well known for taking US chip designs and producing them without a license. The Zilog team had worried about this, and Faggin had come up with the idea of adding transistors that would be subtly modified to operate differently than a visual inspection would suggest. Shima added six of these "traps" around the design. Sometime later, Shima was told by an engineer within NEC that the traps had delayed their copying efforts by six months.[18]
From article:
> In July 1976 the Z80 went on sale. One of Zilog's very first customers was a buyer who, unbeknownst to them, worked for NEC.
> The Zilog team had worried about the trend of Japanese companies making and selling unauthorized clones of American components and Faggin had come up with the idea of adding subtle "trap" transistors that would fool a visual inspection. Shima's previous experience with NEC minicomputers had led him to add the concept of two sets of processor registers to the Z80 and agreed with Faggin's concerns and added six traps to the design. As revealed in the excellent oral history of Zilog, Shima was told by an NEC engineer that the traps had delayed NEC's copying efforts by around six months.
Seems possibly AI generated. Also article is just littered with so many ads that you're better off reading the wiki entry.
1.) We missed a digit when adding in the number for inflation. It was a mispaste. (We had $112, the actual number was $1127.) We will correct this. Our apologies.
2.) Matt pulled from a similar source (the oral history of the Z80), which may reflect some of the similarity in ordering. That said, you are correct, and is a bit too similar for my liking. We are going to make some changes on this section and will make a note on this front. I should note though that this article has many more elements to it than this one passage, and discusses a wide array of topics.
3.) There are three ads on the entire page for a 2,000+-word article. It’s a newsletter, so one is embedded in the article as a sponsorship. The other two are from BuySellAds, and are otherwise minimal. I encourage you to compare that to the number currently on this random article I just pulled from Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/extreme-heat-solar-energy-clean-energy-s...
As far as your “AI generated” claim: That is incredibly rude. Please, read the rest of our articles and tell me where we generate AI. I appreciate your criticism up to the point about the AI generation. That is not fair to Matt, it is not fair to myself as his editor, and it is not the way I want this website perceived.
Please, do not bandy around such claims like that offhand. It harms independent publishers that are actually doing the work.
Don’t blame on bots what can be better blamed on humans trying their best to get it right and stumbling a little.
After seeing that, I stopped reading shortly after and decided to just read the Wikipedia entry instead.
Re: the ads - they blend too much into the article that it was hard to distinguish between an ad and not which is probably why it felt like there were many ads. Sorry about that. You're right, after spending time discerning between an ad section and image there aren't many ads at all.
I hope you’ll read the whole thing as there’s a lot more to it than that and I asked a number of people for their personal history with the chip and I’ve been using a Z80-based machine for most of my life so there’s a lot of personal history in there too.
More broadly, I would encourage you to be careful about claiming things are AI-generated vs. not. You perhaps saw it as a minor thing. I did not.
It is a bad time for actual writers and editors and is seen as a claim of impropriety in media circles. It threatens our work. I reacted strongly to it because, honestly, being seen seriously is a real point of concern.
I hope that makes sense.