The industrial impact

The industrial impact

Applications and successors

The 8080 was used in many early microcomputers, such as the MITS Altair 8800 Computer, Processor Technology SOL-20 Terminal Computer and IMSAI 8080 Microcomputer, forming the basis for machines running the CP/M operating system (the later, fully compatible and more capable, Zilog Z80 processor would capitalize on this, with Z80 & CP/M becoming the dominant CPU & OS combination of the period much like x86 & MS-DOS for the PC a decade later). Even in 1979 after introduction of the Z80 and 8085 processors, five manufacturers of the 8080 were selling an estimated 500,000 units per month at a price around $3 to $4 per unit.The first single-board microcomputer (see the May 1976 issue of Radio-Electronics) called the "dyna-micro" was based on the Intel C8080A, and also used Intel's first EPROM, the C1702A. The dyna-micro was re-branded by E&L Instruments of Derby, CT in 1976 as the "MMD-1" (Mini-Micro Designer 1) and was made famous as the example microcomputer in the very popular 8080 "BugBook" series of the time. One of the early uses of the 8080 was made in the late 1970s by Cubic-Western Data of San Diego, CA in its Automated Fare Collection Systems custom designed for mass transit systems such as BART and others around the world. An early industrial use of the 8080 was as the "brain" of the DatagraphiX Auto-COM (Computer Output Microfiche) line of products which took large amounts of user data from reel-to-reel tape and imaged it onto microfiche. The Auto-COM instruments also included an entire automated film cutting, processing, washing, and drying sub-system - quite a feat, both then and in the 21st century, to all be accomplished successfully with only an 8-bit microprocessor running at a clock speed of less than 1MHz with a 64K byte memory limit. In addition, several early arcade video games were built around the 8080 microprocessor. Space Invaders was perhaps the most popular such title.

Shortly after the launch of the 8080, the Motorola 6800 competing design was introduced, and after that, the MOS Technology 6502 variation of the 6800. Zilog introduced the Z80, which had a compatible machine-language instruction set and initially used the same assembly language as the 8080, but for legal reasons, Zilog developed a syntactically-different (but code compatible) alternative assembly language for the Z80. At Intel, the 8080 was followed by the compatible and electrically more elegant 8085, and later by the assembly language compatible 16-bit 8086 and then the 8/16-bit 8088, which was selected by IBM for its new PC to be launched in 1981. Later NEC made an NEC V20 processor (an 8088 clone) which supported 8080 emulation mode. Thus, the 8080, via its ISA, made a lasting impact on computer history.

The Soviet Union manufactured a complete 8080 analog named KP580ИK80 (later marked as KP580BM80), where even the pins were placed identically. This processor was the base of the Radio86RK (Радио 86РК in Russian), probably the most popular amateur single-board computer in the Soviet Union. Radio86RK's predecessor was the Micro-80 (Микро-80 in Russian), and its successor the Orion-128 (Орион-128 in Russian) which had a graphical display. Both were built on the KP580 processor. According to some sources, the Soviet analog had two undocumented instructions, specific to itself; however, these were not widely known.

Another model compatible with Intel 8080A, named MMN8080, was produced at Microelectronica Bucharest in Romania.

Industry change

The 8080 also changed how computers were created. When the 8080 was introduced, computer systems were usually created by computer manufacturers such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard, or IBM. A manufacturer would produce the entire computer, including processor, terminals, and system software such as compilers and operating system. The 8080 was actually designed for just about any application except a complete computer system. Hewlett Packard developed the HP 2640 series of smart terminals around the 8080. The HP 2647 was a terminal which ran BASIC on the 8080. Microsoft would create the first popular programming language for the 8080, and would later acquire DOS for the IBM-PC.

As the 8080 evolved into the largely compatible x86 family, PCs evolved into workstations and servers of 16, 32 and 64 bits, with advanced memory protection, segmentation, and multiprocessing features, blurring the difference between small and large computers (the 80286 and 80386's protected mode were important in doing so). The size of chips has grown so that the size and power of large x86 chips is not much different from high end architecture chips, and a common strategy to produce a very large computer is to network many x86 processors.

The basic architecture of the 8080 and its successors has replaced many proprietary midrange and mainframe computers, and withstood challenges of technologies such as RISC. Most computer manufacturers have abandoned producing their own processors below the highest performance points. Though x86 may not be the most elegant, or theoretically most efficient design, the sheer market force of so many dollars going into refining a design has made the x86 family today, and will remain for some time, the dominant processor architecture, even bypassing Intel's attempts to replace it with incompatible architectures such as the iAPX 432 and Itanium.