While not a how-to guide, the Z80 book by William Barden and published by Howard Sams, has been placed online. I believe the same book was printed and sold by Radio Shack.

I read that book after Don Lancaster's TTL Cookbook, also published by Howard Sams. That was around 1981, while I was in high school, and I had practically no electronics knowledge before that. Those books were extremely clearly written, and even today provide the foundation of my knowledge of microprocessors and digital logic. I never actually built or programmed a Z80 machine, but the basic knowledge was readily applicable to 6502 and 8088 hardware and software, and even to today's microcontrollers.

Because of the relative simplicity of those systems, I think they are still a good place for anybody to start. Those articles by Steve Ciarcia too. What a genius, at making the microcomputer revolution accessible to hobbyists.

I loaned those books to my best friend, who vanished with them when his family became missionaries, but I don't think he did it out of malice. I'm glad that I can find them online today, just to take me back to those exciting years.

Agree, I have the Z-80 Handbook by William Barden, and it is really well written and contains a lot of information without being a tutorial :)

In 1985, when I first got out of college and started having spare money, I was finally in the position to build a Z80 computer (having spent a couple years in HS using trs-80s). I got the Steve Ciarcia book, started designing my own machine ... then I realized that a 68K CPU was only about $20 more. So I scrapped my Z80 plans and build a 68000 board instead. No regrets.

I think my next project will be a computer based on the 68000 and the ISA bus :-)

Here is a 68000 machine with an ISA bus I built in 1987:

http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/merlin2.html

It originally had an Ethernet interface instead of a bus, but since I couldn't get a PC Ethernet board to connect it to I ripped that out and did a simple ISA (actually 8 bit PC bus instead of full ISA) interface. This allowed me to use PC floppy and HD boards as seen in the picture so I could have a "sneakernet" in place of the missing Ethernet.

Wow, really cool. Do you have more documentation about the ISA bus implementation? :-)

Any way to get that book under 50 bucks?

Looks like you can get a PDF legitimately for free.

https://www.modmypi.com/download/BuildYourOwnZ80.pdf

I was about to say, there's a PDF out there (I did the scanning from my physical copy, after we got permission). Thanks for digging it up!

Edit: Wow, I dug up my original files and realized I did this almost ten years ago: http://www.mrbill.net/byo/

Thanks for the good work! I just want you to know that your scan is still going good work 10 years later. I'm going to read through it and hopefully I end up with a more modern version of this Z80 machine.

The first thing I did was search for the title when I saw the price and this link was what I found.

I doubt that I'll ever get around to building one but now, I have the option.