It brings back memories for me too. This compiler was my first introduction to C, before that I'd used Pascal or Fortran. I worked on Z80 but we also had a 68K project which ran Whitesmith's Idris UNIX clone before we got real System III ported
I'm slightly surprised that no one has suggested PDP-11 assembler as a good starting point if you're not going to learn a current instruction set. Perhaps it's because it was the first one I learnt properly but all the early miccroprocessors felt like a step backwards. I did spend a few years writing Z80 assembler but I wouldn't recommend it nowadays as it's not a very orthogonal instruction set and 6502 doesn't have enough registers to give you a proper feel for writing assembler.
Lost Realms by Thomas Williams is another good book about this period. Rather than Wessex, Mercia etc. it focusses on some of the lesser known kingdoms of that era.
I have a small collection of programming cards from the 70s & 80s. The most amusing one is the VAX-11, which is actually a booklet with 6 pages of instructions plus another whole page of addressing modes. Thankfully I never had to do any VAX assembly programming.
I agree with you. I've also found that themore modern a bike is the more difficult it is to maintain
Take hydraulic disc brakes for example, when they work they are great but when they fail they don't work at all. You then have to bleed them which is fiddly, messy and requires special tools then you'll probably have to do it all over again after a few rides. Tubeless tyres are similar.
The Z80 has lasted a few years longer than me in the computer industry. It came onto the market more or less when I left uni and I retired 2 years ago. For several years in the 1980s I worked on Z80 based terminals and CP/M microcomputers. Most of that work was in assembler but I never really liked the Z80 architecture as I'd been spoilt by the orthogonal instruction set of the PDP-11.
I did a lot of work for both Hitachi and Renesas over the years and used SH-1, 2, 3 and 4 with various OSes. I liked the SH architecture, I first learnt assembly programming on PDP-11s and SH felt like an extended RISCified PDP-11.