KIM-1 @ Retrobits

Are you getting rid of KIM-1 equipment or peripherals? Please don't throw it away! E-mail me and let's see if we can give it a new home! In particular, I am looking for a KIM-4 and a Visable board, but anything accepted. Let me know your desired arrangements, and it goes without saying that I will gladly cover any shipping, time and inconvenience.

What's a KIM-1?

The KIM-1 was made to allow engineers to become familiar with the 6502, which was as released a completely different architecture. Previously, Chuck Peddle, MOS' primary engineer, had developed an earlier 6501 microprocessor that was fully pin- and bus-compatible with the well-known Motorola 6800. However, MOS was able to manufacture the 6501 at extremely high yields due to their repairable mask process; this meant the 6501 could hit the market at a rock-bottom price and undercut Motorola and Intel significantly. Naturally, Motorola was quite unhappy about the prospect of a cheap drop-in replacement for their CPUs and immediately sued, winning after a protracted court battle. To counter this, Peddle converted the 6501 into the "lawsuit-compatible" 6502, essentially by merely rearranging the pinout, but this left MOS with a part that could not simply be dropped into existing designs without work. As an enticement to other engineers, MOS threw together a small evaluation board, slapped a 6502, I/O chips, a basic monitor program and 1K (one kilobyte) of RAM on it, and released that as the KIM-1 kit for just $245.

What Peddle didn't expect was that hobbyists, not engineers, would be the KIM's greatest audience. At one of the lowest prices for a computer kit (due to the 6502's extremely low price: just $25, compared with $179 for a 6800 or an Intel 8080), a computer enthusiast could put together a complete, state-of-the-art home system with teletype and tape drive -- both directly supported by the KIM-1's ROM -- for less than $500. The immensely open architecture fostered a burgeoning community of software authors, hardware developers and expansion options; despite this, however, MOS Technology continued to suffer under the cost of the Motorola lawsuit and the collapse of the calculator industry and sold out to Commodore Business Machines in 1976. Commodore, wisely, continued to produce the KIM-1 for several more revisions due to its continued popularity until around 1979. Board versions through Revision G are known.

The KIM-1 is closely related to other 6502-based single-board computers, including the Rockwell TIM (JOLT), the Rockwell AIM-65 and the Synertek SYM-1. These will only be discussed here in the context of comparison to the KIM-1.

What features does a KIM-1 have?

What can I do with a KIM-1?

How do I use a KIM-1?

When you turn on the power supply, the six LEDs light up with the current address (left 4) and its contents (right 2) -- if they don't light up, tap RS and they should appear. Press AD to enter a new address, DA to enter data in that address, and + to move from cell to cell. To set yourself up into a sane environment, turn the keypad switch (the Single Step Toggle) to OFF, and punch in this sequence:

[AD] 1 7 F A [DA] 0 0 [+] 1 C [+]

This sets the NMI vector to the main monitor program so that stopping works. Now, enter a program or data, and when you're ready to run, set the address to the starting point and punch GO. If your program hangs, hit ST to stop it and return to the monitor (or if that doesn't work, hit RS for a non-destructive reset, although you may not be able to return to the spot of the foul).

You will need to know 6502 machine language opcodes to program the KIM-1 effectively, a topic far beyond this page. For more, look at the Links and Archives page for a copy of the KIM-1 User Manual.

What peripherals exist for the KIM-1?

Many users interfaced their KIM-1s to a teletype, usually some form of ASR-33 or a relative. Naturally, you didn't have to use a real ol' antique teletype; many users converted the connection to work with "glass teletypes" (a/k/a standard dummy terminals). More on that in a second.

KIM-1s could also drive video displays with appropriate hardware. Probably the best known was Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, affectionately dubbed the "TVT," most relevant for the KIM-1 in the 6800 bus compatible TVT-6 (thus also with the 6502). The TVT-6 supported multiple text resolutions, including the original TVT's 32x16 display plus 64x13 and 64x25; the TVT-6L did all that plus lowercase. It was extremely popular due to its low cost and easy construction, although much of the cost reduction was achieved by making the CPU do some of the display work, an (IMHO) impaired design. For this reason other display peripherals emerged, but my personal favourite is the K-1008 Visable Memory Board [sic: NOT Visible] by MTU, an 8K memory board with a clever secondary function: plug in a composite monitor, and the 8K of RAM is seen as a monochrome 320x200 hi-resolution display. Commodore 64 denizens will be delighted to know that the bit addressing is very simple; the byte offset is (199-y)*40+INT(x/8) and the bit is x modulo 8, with the leftmost bit being bit 0. PolyMorphic made a VTI card that had the video and keyboard interface all on the same device.

Finally, with all these cards, you needed heavy duty power and card management, and Commodore/MOS made the KIM-4 for you to stick them all in. This device offered six slots, buffering circuitry and and beefier power management. And if you wanted to connect S-100 cards to the KIM instead, then you could get a KIMSI from Forethought Products and plug your cards into that. (It is interesting to note that the KIMSI works with the Apple I as well, so that means that the KIM and Apple I must have the same 44-pin cardedge pinout.)

Commodore/MOS also made the KIM-5, an ROM application card with a resident editor and single-pass assembler that could read source from memory or tape, and the KIM-6, a wirewrap prototyping board for homebrew projects.

Nowadays, you can still get new KIM-1 peripherals. Bob Applegate, for example, offers his own 4K memory board as well as a custom I/O board. This last is particularly handy as it converts the 20mA "current loop" TTY interface into standard RS-232, ready to connect to any modern computer with a serial port (and now you can have your own "glass teletype"). Here is Bob's KIM-1 peripherals page.

How can I emulate a KIM-1?

That said, most of the emulators only give you the basic hardware (the MESS driver is particularly unadorned). This was part of the reason I wrote my own.

The Incredible KIMplement, in my very biased opinion, will give you probably the fullest view of what a KIM can do of the presently extant emulators. While I am still working on its feature set, it provides a standard TTY (a simulated ASR-33), includes an emulated KIM-4 with a total of 16K RAM, and is complete enough to run many programs from The First Book of KIM and even Tiny BASIC! What's more, it will run on a real Commodore 64, or any system that has a Commodore 64 emulator available (Macintosh, DOS, Windows, Linux/most Unices). Please give it a spin. ROMs are built-in and not required.

How can I build/buy/expand a KIM-1 of my own?

If you don't want to build your own, you can always buy used, and KIM-1 units do appear on eBay or other auction sites in varying condition from time to time. Particularly fine specimens in working condition with manuals and accessories may not be cheap, however. Perhaps going homebrew is looking better and better ...

If you're just interested in playing with the 6502, you might look at one of the single-board KIM relatives such as the SYM-1 or AIM-65; 6502.org's Trainers Section has some resources for you to start. Or get a Commodore 64, which is a cheap and plentiful computer, and enjoy life on a wonderful 6502-based platform that's fun to program and plays great old school games (and can emulate a KIM, too).

Where to now?

Or, would you like to see what else there is at Floodgap Retrobits?