Iconic Machines

KIM-1

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 KIM-1 — Volume 1 — The Board That Taught a Generation Machine Code A bare green circuit board with a calculator keypad and six red digits, sold for $245 in 1976 to show engineers what a $25 microprocessor could do, and how it became the machine on which thousands of people learned to program a computer one hexadecimal byte at a time — the orientation volume for the eleven-part series
    2. Vol 2 KIM-1 — Volume 2 — MOS Technology and the $25 Microprocessor — Peddle, the 6800 Team and the 6502 How a group of Motorola engineers walked out to build a microprocessor cheap enough to replace ordinary logic, how a Pennsylvania calculator-chip maker learned to make it, how it went on sale for $25 from a San Francisco hotel suite, and why the company then needed a little computer on a board to show people what to do with it
    3. Vol 3 KIM-1 — Volume 3 — The Board — 6502, Two 6530 RIOTs, a Keypad, Six LEDs, Cassette and Teletype The KIM-1 chip by chip: a 6502 and its crystal, two custom 6530 combination chips that hold the monitor and do all the input and output, eight one-bit memory chips, one decoder that carves up the address space, and the trick by which seven port lines both light six digits and read twenty-three keys
    4. Vol 4 KIM-1 — Volume 4 — The KIM Monitor — Keying In, Stepping and Saving Programs The two kilobytes of ROM that turned a bare board into a usable computer: how an owner entered a program byte by byte with AD, DA and +, ran and stopped it, read the registers, stepped through it one instruction at a time, borrowed the monitor's own routines, and saved the result on cassette or punched paper tape — with every example run in the series' simulator
    5. Vol 5 KIM-1 — Volume 5 — The KIM Community — The First Book of KIM, User Notes, Microchess and Focal A newsletter born at a Cleveland computer show, a Toronto programmer who explained the KIM to everyone, a book of games for six red digits, a chess program in 1,118 bytes that started a software business, and the languages, clubs and courses that grew up around one identical board
    6. Vol 6 KIM-1 — Volume 6 — The KIM as a Brain — Robots, Controllers and Mike/Microtron Fifteen spare input/output lines and a hardware timer: why a demonstration board for a $25 chip ended up inside aircraft navigation experiments, radio stations, organs, typewriters and model railways, and how a teenager in New Jersey made one the brain of a robot
    7. Vol 7 KIM-1 — Volume 7 — Commodore, the PET and the KIM's Legacy A calculator maker buys a chip maker for stock, the KIM-1 gets a Commodore logo, Chuck Peddle turns the lessons of a single-board computer into the PET 2001, Rockwell, Synertek and Elektor build their own KIMs, and the 6502 goes on to outlive them all
    8. Vol 8 KIM-1 — Volume 8 — The Replicas — Re-Making the KIM-1 Why no one can build a KIM-1 from new parts, the one workaround every replica uses, and a dated survey of what was actually available in October 2026: exact copies of the 1976 board, working clones with modern memory, a microcontroller emulator for the price of a meal, and software that runs the original monitor
    9. Vol 9 KIM-1 — Volume 9 — Building a KIM-1 Replica The PAL-2 kit from four small boxes to a KIM prompt: the parts and what each replaces on the 1976 board, the soldering order, the switch settings, the first press of RS, the User Manual's first program and a teleprinter session over USB, how to give the replica back its cassette interface, and the purist's alternative
    10. Vol 10 KIM-1 — Volume 10 — Programming the KIM-1 — From Lit Segments to Games Five programs that climb from the hardware upwards: spelling a word by switching segments on and off, a decimal counter on the monitor's display routine, a clock kept by the 6530's interval timer and an interrupt, Jim Butterfield's adding machine on the keypad, and a complete number-guessing game, each assembled and run in the series' simulator with its display shown
    11. Vol 11 KIM-1 — Volume 11 — Learning Machine Code on a KIM-1 Where I first learned machine code and assembly, what a KIM-1 asked of anyone learning that way — hexadecimal, opcodes looked up by hand, branch offsets counted on paper, single-stepping through a program one instruction at a time — and how it led on to a Heathkit trainer, the family Apple-1 and a robot