Replies

Yep, still have my (second) KIM-1. Mounted to a piece of plywood, with power supply, serial port adapter, cassette tape interface... and it still works.

My first KIM was like the photo you posted, early release with white ceramic 40-pin chips. I had to leave that one behind when I moved in 1978 (details unimportant) and so I ended up replacing it with one that had the black epoxy chips, which wasn't quite as cool looking but worked just as well.

I piggy-backed a second set of 1Kbitx1 2102 SRAM chips over the existing set... Wow, a whole 2KB of RAM!!

Around 1979 I found a bunch of surplus bare PCBs about 4"x6" that each could hold quantity 32 of the 2102s. So each board could hold 4KB -- a VAST amount compared to the KIM's 1KB... And I scrounged enough 2102s to populate seven of those boards, so I had 28KB of RAM. Every chip hand-soldered, every pin... The boards were stacked and cross-wired into a 3D matrix that looked vaguely reminiscent of a 7-layer 3D chess board. Wirewrapped some address selectors and bus buffers, and the KIM drove it just fine.

*sigh*