Hardware Standardization and State-Socialist Piracy: The Global Reach of the Zilog Z80 (2024)
The broad contours of the personal computing industry can be traced via contradictory waves of consolidation and fragmentation. For example, the incorporation of diverse systems under the banner of Internet connectivity in the 1990s paradoxically resulted in a narrower range of platforms. This article extends this framework backward through the inverse case of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. While the market was heavily splintered during its late 1970s and 1980s heyday, the CPU's ubiquity, including in Asian, Latin American, and European hardware following the MSX standard, shows how material and logistical histories of microprocessor standardization did not inevitably lead to interoperability. Nevertheless, hardware standards predate cross-platform PC software compatibility, and the Z80’s transnational impact is especially visible in its unauthorized East German clone, the U880. Despite platform divergences, the Z80 represents an important illustration of globalizing computational infrastructure prior to the collapse of state socialism and the breakthroughs of the 1990s.
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