Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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The KIM-1 was one of my very first machines, I faithfully lugged it with me across many moves and one day it just disappeared. I still have faint hope that it's somewhere in one of my (too) many storage boxes but I suspect it just got lost. Really a pity because they are becoming more and more rare.

Nice to see this one restored to its full glory. Trying to explain to my kids that once upon a time the full working memory of my computer was a very small fraction of one of the photos they share online was a fun experience.

Note the gorgeous very high quality circuit board.

As for the article: I'm not particularly impressed with the workmanship, as a kid I'd repair boards of this and higher complexity regularly and lifting traces and cutting traces while doing such a simple repair would not normally happen to me. One way to do better would be to use a good quality rework iron with a vacuum pump. Not cheap but if you work on old and nice hole through stuff like this well worth the investment. Otherwise you end up overheating the board. A repair should look more or less as if the board wasn't touched, apart from maybe the gloss on the solder. And make sure to use 63/37 'old fashioned' solder.

It was the first thing I learned to program on. My father went to a conference where they gave him one as swag, and he gave it to my older brother and me. I was, I think, seven years old or so.

Writing code that we hand assembled taught me a lot. It’s probably still in a box at my folks place somewhere in the garage.

(author) Hey now, not all of us are adept at this. I appreciate the tips but we all start somewhere. I was particularly motivated on this one because it's a relatively simple machine that's special to me and I should be able to maintain it.

Hey there, yes, I'm happy you managed to fix it. But you probably would have done a much better job by first practicing IC removal on a bunch of older boards, by the time you can do that with your eyes closed you can practice on the heirlooms ;)

Of course it's yours and you're absolutely within your rights to work on it and your analysis of what was wrong was spot on (and very impressive). But these are getting rare.

I wonder what caused the chip to fail, once in the circuit they are normally quite solid. Keep 'm rolling ;)

I appreciate that. Everything is a learning experience.

I'm told that RAM is a common failure on KIMs, though this was the first one I've personally experienced with my own set.

On mine the LM565 chip had gone, as well as a diode, when I got it from a guy in Almere who worked at the same bank where I worked. That's also the only one that I ever came across here in Europe, there can't have been that many here. I really should make an effort to see if I can find it again.

And yes, everything is a learning experience, I'm pretty sure you'd have a much easier time of it if you did it again. Please do consider getting a proper rework kit, it's well worth it if you're going to do this sort of thing regularly. And in a strange way those skills are getting more valuable again, fewer and fewer people around that can repair vintage stuff. One of my 'side projects' is restoring vintage DX-7's, they're fun to work on and there are enough of them around that even if you buy one that seems to be total junk you'll be able to get another one going and have parts left over.

I "lost" mine in a move about 40 years ago. I have been in mourning ever since.

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