18 May
2012
18 May
'12
11:33 a.m.
On 2012 May 18, at 11:24 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 18 May 2012 at 17:55, Rich Alderson wrote:
I remember the KIM-1 from advertisements and articles at the time.
No, it wasn't much to build a system around, but was it any worse
than any other evaluation board / educational SBC, such as the COSMAC
Elf, MEK6800, etc.?
(Arguably, the Apple I was 'more' as it had BASIC present.)
I remember the KIM-1 from the pages of _Popular
Electronics_, and
even
handled one in a class on computational linguistics (not yet called
that) with Victor Yngve at UChicago. Victor was the creator of a
programming language called COMIT, which he was still teaching in the
1970s long after SNOBOL and even Icon had come along, but a heck of a
nice guy.
I worked on a couple of these things--toys, really. A friend had
one and sought to add onto it like crazy. He had a KIM-to-S100
converter called a KIMSI, had bought a new power supply and case, a
Shugart SA400 (IIRC) disk drive, someone's S100 floppy controller and
even a 2708 EPROM programming board (plugged into the KIM). I
considered the matter throwing good money after bad.
Synertek also had the much-enhanced SYM-1 board.