Commodore/MOS KIM-1 (2004)

My first awareness of the KIM-1 was from Tod Loofbourrow's book "How to Build a Computer-Controlled Robot" from 1978. I flipped through it and marveled at the single-board computer he added to his home-made robots to control it - puzzled over the assembly code in the book. Fourteen-year-old me could never have hoped to afford the KIM-1, nor did I have any mentor that could have helped me to learn to program it.

As a seasoned programmer now it's fun to go back to those things that were early sparks, things that were at the time so over my head....

I've built two KIM-1 replicas. I started with Vince Briel's Micro-KIM kit that he sold years ago (no longer in business or available), and then there's the still-available and excellent PAL-1 [1] kit from Liu Ganning in China.

If you want to toy around with these simpler machines from a simpler time, they're easy enough to assemble (and you can always connect them via serial to a PC to make program entry and saving a lot easier than cassette).

Oh, I would be remiss not to mention Hans Otten's site [2] on the KIM-1 and replicas.

(Aside: what a hilarious era when anagrams for computers or robots were proper names like HAL, KIM, etc. I'm going to be spending the rest of the morning thinking of others now.)

[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/tkoak/pal-1-a-mos-6502-power...

[2] http://retro.hansotten.nl/kim-1-clones-and-replicas/

As a 12-year old kid in the 80s I started that whole computing thing on a very similar computer (but Z80-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC80), mainly because I didn't have access to anything else at the time.

But in hindsight I think it was the perfect start into programming, because it becomes clear pretty quickly why assemblers and higher level programming languages were invented (basically learning to program by doing a speedrun through computing history). It also takes away the irrational fear of staring at machine code hex dumps and assembly listings ;)

PS: here's my attempt at emulating an LC-80 while "keeping the flair" of being exposed to the motherboard (turn down volume first): https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/lc80.html

John Kennedy has done a very thorough emulation of the KIM-1 on iOS for anybody wanting to play with it https://apps.apple.com/us/app/virtualkim/id1548356829

In my middle school 1983 we had similar, but with SC/MP uP, hex keyboard, 8 LED output port. We called it scamp, learning machine code and basics of architecture. Advanced students worked on a Cromemco, and we, dumbasses, we learned on that scamp.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

We went from Single Board Computers to Single Board Computers.

Such an amazing journey.

Nothing like poking machine code directly into memory, and when it crashes it takes the whole thing down and you lose everything. Learned really quick that way! Great times, part of why I've always enjoyed a deep understanding what's behind a technology.