Kim-1

From AboveTheGarage

I remember buying a Kim-1 for about two hundred bucks.

It was a single board with a 6502 processor, 1K of RAM, and some I/O chips. It had exposed electrical connectors. I hooked up a radio to an input and a speaker to an output and experimented with sampling 1-bit audio. I also hooked up a microphone and recorded a 256-byte (2k bit) sample of "Hello" which I somehow sucked out of it and used for a long time on any hardware that could twiddle an output bit. (There was also a resistor in-line with the input source which let me adjust the radio or microphone input so it was just on the edge of the 0/1 transition; then the audio would flip the bit either way.) Sadly I lost the sample or I would make it available because it's kind of cute.

Later I donated it to UCI for use in their hardware lab. I made a giant connector from the Kim-1 to the hardware work stations they had which allowed a person to easily connect logic circuits to the Kim-1 I/O devices. I'm not sure if anyone ever used it. It's one of those things you kind of wish you saved ... but then ... is it really worth the storage space? Thankfully there are pictures online of these things. (Heh ... when I ran that search today I saw "Lil Kim" mixed in.)

The Kim-1 was so limited. I programmed it in machine language. Not assembly language - machine language. I translated the opcodes myself into hex and entered them on the keyboard. It was crazy!

I also remember programming it to play a two-part version of The Main Street Electrical Parade.

-30-