Loadstar 247/247.d81/t.tales of Kim 4

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             Tales of Kim
      On the Edge -- Chapter 1.5
           by Brian Bagnell
               Part IV


    Commodore soon realized the value
of Microchess. At the time, electronic
games were becoming popular in
households. Several companies released
handheld games such as Simon (Milton
Bradley), Merlin (Parker Brothers),
and later Speak & Spell (Texas
Instruments). Each of these electronic
games would go on to huge success,
especially when E.T. the Extra
Terrestrial featured Speak & Spell in
1982. Commodore wanted a piece of the
electronic games market, so they
contacted Jennings about creating
their own handheld game.

    "We did a thing called CHESSmate
based around Jennings work," says
Peddle. Internally, CHESSmate was very
similar to an ordinary Kim-1 computer,
with a sibling of the 6502
microprocessor, the 6504, substituted.
Commodore hired Jolt maker
Microcomputer Associates to construct
the CHESSmate prototype. "Of course,
it didn't work very well," adds
Peddle.

    At the time the CHESSmate was
developed there was only one other
electronic chess game, the Fidelity
Chess Challenger. The contract with
Commodore called for Jennings' game to
beat the Chess Challenger in
tournament play. "One of the funniest
moments was my lawyer going over the
contract," recalls Jennings. "He read
the clause which required that my
program beat the Chess Challenger and
pondered it over for a while. He just
couldn't wrap his mind around the
concept of the two machines playing
against each other and one winning.

    'What do you mean.' he kept
asking. It's hard to put yourself back
to the seventies when most people had
no contact with computers and had no
concept of machines that played games
against people or other computers."
Commodore engineers added more ROM
memory to the game, and Jennings
improved his Microchess code by adding
32 opening moves. He even provided
eight different play levels to the
game so novices could enjoy the game.
CHESSmate was able to hold up
Jennings' end of the contract by
consistently beating the rival Chess
Challenger.

    In 1978, Jennings traveled to
Pasadena where Bobby Fischer was in
hiding from the world. He spent
several days demonstrating the
prototype CHESSmate software running
on an expanded KIM-1. Fischer played
many games and handily beat the
program each time, but he had a
strange fascination with the alien
strategy devised by a machine.

    Fischer even challenged Jennings
to a game, an offer that caught
Jennings off guard. "It was a surreal
experience being challenged by the
reigning world champion to a friendly
game at a time when very few people
even knew where Bobby was and nobody
had seen or played him in years," says
Jennings. Though Fischer predictably
won, Jennings believes he gave Fischer
a respectable challenge.

    A consummate businessman, Jennings
offered a royalty to Fischer in return
for calling the electronic game the
"Bobby". At the time, the strongest
commercial game available was the
"Boris" named after Boris Spassky, who
Bobby Fischer had defeated in Iceland
for the title of World Champion. Even
though the CHESSmate would play
competitively against the Boris
computer it could not defeat it every
time. Fischer declined and "Bobby"
became CHESSmate.

    An application that causes users
to purchase a computer is called a
killer app. Games were rapidly
fulfilling this role for the KIM-1 and
other early microcomputers, and
Microchess was one of the biggest
sellers. Over the next ten years,
Peter Jennings sold several million
copies of Microchess to owners of home
computers. With the help of the KIM-1,
Jennings helped pioneer the computer
games industry.


THE KIM MODULAR SYSTEM

    After the Commodore acquisition,
the KIM-1 officially became the first
computer marketed under the Commodore
name, along with the TIM kit. All
KIM-1 computers now included the
Commodore "chicken-head" logo etched
into the printed circuit board. John
May had originally designed the KIM-1
with expansion in mind, as evidenced
by the system bus and I/O lines made
available to the user on the card edge
connectors.

    With the surprise success of the
KIM-1, others soon decided to create
hardware expansions for the KIM
system. One entrepreneur who spotted
the potential was another former GE
employee, Larry Hittle.

    Peddle recalls Hittle's
contribution to the GE computer
program. "He was involved with that
whole program," says Peddle. "He put
GE in the communications business. He
was the guy that put together the
communications system for the original
Dartmouth machine." Like many ex-GE
employees, he was an entrepreneur.

    "He got the idea of starting his
own CRT [Cathode Ray Tube] company, a
company called Courier Systems. So he
spun a company out of GE. He started
Courier and did all the things wrong
that all the other entrepreneurs were
doing. Venture capitalists stole him
blind, and he finally dropped out of
that company to start his own little
assembly company." Hittle formed a
company in the Denver area called
Monolithic Systems. As it turns out,
one of the first devices manufactured
by Hittle's company was an accessory
for the KIM-1.

    "He was heavily involved [with
Commodore] for a while," says Peddle.
With the surprise success of the
KIM-1, Hittle decided to design and
manufacture his own line of KIM-1
expansion products.

    Additional memory was the most
desired commodity. Hittle developed
two different memory expansion boards,
the KIM-2 and KIM-3, with four and
eight kilobytes of RAM respectively.
At the heart of Hittle's expansion
system was a motherboard, called the
KIM-4. The foot-squared KIM-4
motherboard mated with the KIM-1
expansion connector, essentially
creating an elongated circuit board.

    It contained six expansion slots,
much like the slots on an Altair
computer. Each slot contained 44-pin
connectors. This allowed users to
connect video cards, sound cards,
memory cards, keyboard adapters, or
anything else the computer world
dreamed up. If six slots in the KIM
were not enough, Hittle designed the
board with a BUS expansion connector
so users could attach several KIM-4
motherboards to each other.

    Hittle also created two accessory
cards for his motherboard. The first
was the KIM-5 resident assembler and
editor, which was provided essential
software tools in ROM. He also created
the KIM-6 prototyping board, useful
for hardware designers creating their
own electronics for the KIM.

    In partnership with Hittle,
Commodore sold and marketed all the
KIM expansion products, releasing a
color brochure of the entire line of
products. The KIM-1, which began life
as a demonstrator, was becoming a true
computer system.

    Other third-party developers also
produced KIM-1 hardware products. Don
Lancaster, famous for his
groundbreaking early writings in BYTE
magazine on digital logic and video
interfaces, designed and sold a
version of his TV Typewriter that
allowed the KIM-1 to connect to a
television or video monitor. He
marketed the device through his
company, Synergetics.

    Many homebrew projects were
created by hackers to extend the
capability of the KIM-1.

    Peter Jennings expanded his Kim
system to 8 kilobytes RAM. More
importantly, he added two 8-inch
floppy disk drives which required that
he also create his own disk operating
system in order to use them. He also
created the Micro-ADE development
system, a popular KIM-1 utility for
cassette or disk based development.
The resulting system was so powerful
Jennings used it to develop later
versions of Microchess for the
Commodore PET and Apple II

    Jennings also attached his KIM-1
system to a primitive modem so he
could operate his computer remotely.
This feature came in handy when
Jennings flew to Santa Clara to
deliver his CHESSmate code. While in
the offices of Microcomputer
Associates, Jennings realized his code
required some minor changes. Using a
terminal equipped with a paper tape
punch, Jennings called his KIM-1
system in Toronto, made the required
changes to the source code,
re-assembled the code, then punched
out a new paper tape to be burned into
ROM. It was an impressive
demonstration from what loo