http://retro.hansotten.nl/6502-sbc/kim-1-manuals-and-softwar...
The author of the robot book [1] had an unusual last name. When I came across the same last name during my time at Apple, a co-worker, I emailed him and he said that it was in fact his brother that had written the book. Small world, I guess.
So many different kind of systems, each struggling to find their own user base and differentiate.
Magazines were key to the process of discovery of what and how to use your computer of choice. I had stacks and stacks of magazines, and became adept at reading LIST’ings at the news-stand and learning deep secrets that I eagerly re-implemented once I got back home. Because I had to, anyway, my computer didn’t have much software market-wise.
For many of us, the computer revolution came at a sweet spot of adolescent development. As a young early computer user of the 70’s/80’s, I learned a lot of stuff that is simply taken for granted today, by having to do it myself on various systems.
The standardization of platforms back then was for sure, not a certainty. The sheer variety of ideas about how computing systems should be built and used, industry or personal, was actually kind of astonishing.
This is why I am heartened by the very, very thriving retro-computing scene. Computers don’t grow old - their users do!
1. My 1976 KIM-1 https://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-1976-kim-1.html
2. Getting the KIM-1 to talk to my Mac https://blog.jgc.org/2025/02/getting-kim-1-to-talk-to-my-mac...
There's something really appealing about machines this simple which has been lost in the modern era. But this particular board was very limited, there wasn't a lot you could actually do with it.
He wrote the “The First Book of KIM” and it kickstarted his career within the 6502/6510 microprocessor family namely Commodore.
He is such an awesome role model to this day in explaining complex concepts to the average people that made them hungry for more.
Search him on YouTube, you will want to start BASIC on C64 the moment you watch him unpacking a C64 and plugin it in to show how easy it is to write BASIC programs for fun.
I wrote an interrupt driven cassette data writer to record data while the foreground was doing something else.
The project was to strap a Kim-1 and a cassette recorder to the chest of a skydiver and record their cardiac data after they jumped out of the plane. We wanted to be able to preserve as much of the data as possible should the skydiver go splat. Kind of dark but you know, programming is not all unicorns and rainbows.
Then I did boring stuff like running fig-forth, building my own floppy disc controller and forth block disk drivers. You know, the usual Kim-1 stuff
It did not require an external computer or terminal to use, you could program and run it from the built-in hex keypad. The simple 6502 instruction set did not require an assembler, it was quite practical to write the assembly language program on paper and then hand-assemble it by looking up the hex opcodes -- after a while you remembered the most common ones -- this was actually simpler and faster than dealing with program development tools. It only took a few minutes to key in a couple of hundred bytes, which was sufficient for many control programs -- you were not using the KIM as a personal computer, but as a (much better!) replacement for dozens of TTL chips and IC timers.
You could use it to do real work, build real devices. I built this programmable gas mixer for respiratory physiology experiments:
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1980.4... Programmable Gas Mixer ..., Journal of Applied Physiology 49(1), 1980.
You can see similar scope in the 8051 microcontroller, too.
https://t3x.org/t3x/0/sim65kit.html
Calculator:
https://t3x.org/kimuno/kimcalc.html
If you can get microchess and know a little of 6502, you can trivially adapt the ACIA serial code to the I/O of the simulator from T3X.
Also, T3X/0 itself:
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