Re: If you could design a $300 homecomputer today, what would youchoose?

[Michael Black <blackm00@gloria.cam.org>]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Bob Retelle wrote:

> [stuff deleted]
> I always lusted after a KIM-1, even though it cost more than our $300
> price point,  and did very little.   Want to guess how many were
> actually sold?
> 
> 
> BobR
> 
Maybe I should have left more context in, because I'm trying to figure
out your implication.

My recollection was that the KIM-1 was a popular computer, though
at a time when popular didn't have to mean a large quantity.  At
the time it was sold, it was still early in the cycle of small computers.
People were still wanting computers because they had always wanted
a computer (something a few years before was an impossibility for
most), rather than because they had a need to do something with
a computer.  So the low cost, for the time, was to many more significant
than the fact that it lacked memory, etc.  In fact, the KIM-1
wasn't all that limited for the time, remember the Altair came
with something liek 256 bytes of memory.  To get a computer
"that did something" you'd have to spend considerably more.

And of course, some people took their KIM-1's and made them into
full-blown systems, with video boards or dumb terminals, 32K of
memory, disk drives, and all kinds of things.

I have a KIM-1, got it in 1979 (late for the time, but clearly
way before most people got computers), so I'm biased.  But my
impression is that the KIM-1 was an influential system,
coming between the S-100 systems that started it all, and
the all in ones that came in 1977, like the Apple and the Radio
Shack. 

And now I'm really curious about your impression of how many
KIM-1's were sold.

   Michael