In the 80s, Zilog Inc. made the Z80 chip used in the ZX81 home computer. These days, they also make "Captain Zilog" — a delightfully bonkers comic to promote their "system on a chip solutions".
Basically, the comic consists of Captain Zilog fighting the sorts of nefarious superpowered monsters that crop up in, you know, embedded systems.
Zilog, it turns out, has a fascinating history. As a great piece in Motherboard describes, the company was founded by Federico Fagin, who originally worked at Intel and headed design of Intel's famous 4004 chip — but then left, "pissed about Intel's new requirement that employees had to arrive by eight in the morning, while he usually worked nights."
I appreciate this guy's priorities. Anyway, Fagin founded Zilog, and soon was approached by Exxon — because Exxon apparently wanted to become a huge computer giant to rival IBM and Apple. The plan fell apart, and Exxon only released one line of computers — the 500 series, pictured here from Old-Computers.com:
In a rival parallel universe, I suppose, Exxon succeeded, and we're all walking around carrying Valdezphones or something.
