Most histories of personal computing focus on devices resembling a modern computer, with a keyboard and screen — perhaps provided separate from the main product — and the main hardware hidden by a case. However, a full accounting of computers for personal use really ought to be more expansive. If you wanted a computer in the 1950s, you could go with the Geniac, made out of masonite disks and wires.
Inside the front cover of Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958.
Options in the 1960s included using the book How to Build a Working Digital Computer; paperclips are a major component. For memory, the book suggests a literal food can; advice includes making sure to remove the paper label and any paint from the can before use.
Some kits from the 1970s involved literal exposed circuit boards. The TK-80, for example, was a kit sold in Japan; one of the earliest adaptations of anime to computers (Space Battleship Yamato) was made for the system.
ASCII Magazine, August 1978, from bsittler via Gaming Alexandria.
The system for today’s game is a KIM-1, which first was sold by MOS Technology in 1976. By default it had room for displaying six characters of text at a time using a “calculator display”.
Based on source code from The First Book of KIM (1979) the six letters could go a long way, allowing for Blackjack games, Hunt the Wumpus, Lunar Lander, and an animal-recognition program called Farmer Brown.
As the symbols above imply, the calculator display can be used in unusual ways; letters and words required creative modifications.
Read the text here as “you are at”.
Today’s author, Robert Leedom, started his experiences with computing in the hardscrabble 60s; while he didn’t build the paperclip computer, he did build an analog computer while in high school. He ran across the People’s Computing Company in their early days, and after attending college at Johns Hopkins (programming with punched cards) he got a job at Westinghouse and obtained experience with a Data General Nova, noodling with the programs from Ahl’s collection of BASIC computer games.
At some point he saw Adventure on a mainframe, as the author explains:
I had seen Colossal Cave Adventure running on an IBM mainframe, so I decided to see how much of a similar game I could cram into 1188 bytes–I think that’s the total on a virgin KIM-1, which was the only computer I had access to. I had no I/O capabilities other than the KIM-1 display and keyboard, plus a cassette tape recorder. Therefore, the program was assembled by hand, and then I typed (on a typewriter, of course) the “listing” of the source code.
Just like a common hack for modern machines is to see if it runs DOOM, programmers of the late-70s-early-80s tried to make every computer play a form of Adventure, even ones that were absurdly limited. Leedom cheekily explains in an interview he managed to fit “26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over for user expansion.” In a different interview Leedom explains he used compression rather like the Z-Code of Infocom or the A-Code of Level 9.
He managed to find a local company to print copies and showed up to the 1979 Computer Faire in San Francisco Atlantic City wearing an “Ask me about KIM-Venture” shirt.
I had technical issues getting the game running (I tried roughly back when the game was first dumped) but there’s now a helpful Youtube guide accompanying an online emulator and the source code on Github. Due to the size limit the score can’t be known from the base game; after finishing you can upload the SCORER program to the right address (which copies atop the main program) and run it.
The limited keyboard of the KIM-1 means it has no parser but rather improvises using the buttons available. From the manual:
I love the fact that (due to the letters being restricted to A-F, as in hexadecimal) “E” for Employ becomes the Use button.
Our quest is to find the hidden caves of Nirdarf and its treasures.
Many, many years ago, before the Semi-Colossal Caverns of Nirdarf were the subject of whispered terror, a townsman found a scrap of paper wrapped up in an oak leaf, down in Least Valley. That’s a few miles north of here, and that’s where the last explorers were finally found … absolutely mad. Anyway, this scrap had some scribbling on it, and a little drawing, and lots of the local folks think the message has to do with the caves and the treasures.
The scrap of paper is not only provided in the manual…
…but also gets represented in the game itself. You get prompted to act by what vaguely looks like a question mark, and on the same display you also get shown the “current image” of the most recently seen symbol.
Here’s an animation of the opening of the game just to show what the game looks like to play; I enter a location described as having a 2-inch slit. (This is a larger GIF size than I normally use, but the experience here is so much different than a typical computer game I think it’s important.)
The game kicks off in a clearly-inspired-by-Adventure area. You’re at a stream, a house is to the north, and if you go down while in the house you can find a cellar with a file, cage, and rope.
The game deviates from Adventure upon heading south and arriving at a grate; employing the file (not keys!) turns it into an “open” grate. (The way using objects works is you press E to start the process, and then the game lists each of your objects in order; you press E again when the right object displays in order to use it.)
First off while inside is a “tunnel” with a rod, and a “bird room” based with a bird that can be caught in a cage. The usual behavior applies where you can’t pick up a bird while holding the rod (this is mentioned in the manual as a hint).
Next comes a “purple oracle” room, which I’ll show as actual screenshots. Keep in mind these appear slowly one at a time!
So the purple oracle has a sign that says the magic button is 0. This is hinting about an mention in the manual about the “F” key; if you press it, the game requests what the magic button is. To get the magic started, you need to press “0”. In most locations this will do nothing still (“no joy”) but if you are at the Stone Steps in the underground you get teleported to the Cellar, and vice versa. I don’t know if there are more teleport spots, because I’m stuck immediately after on a dragon.
The dragon blocks all directions except back to the steps. If you employ the bird (thinking perhaps this will work like the snake in Adventure) the dragon simply eats the bird. The rod, rope, file, and cage get “no joy”. I am honestly not sure what to do from here!
I have not tried every item in every place (maybe the bird wants to be free in the glen?) mainly because it is very slow trying to do anything in this game, but I find it fascinating to be stuck with such apparently limited options. I also have not investigated any of the glyphs that show up in the rooms (the symbols that show when the game prompts for an action) and if their significance needs to be gleaned for a puzzle.
There’s a longplay on an actual KIM-1 so I can fall back on that if I need to, but despite it being on such an unusual system I’m going to treat it like a regular adventure game and hold off from looking up hints for a while longer.
Thanks to Code Monkey King and Kevin Bunch, whose interviews with Robert Leedom I used for the history section of this post. Code Monkey King also made the emulator but note you should use the older version of his emulator if you want to play, as the newer one I’ve found has an error. (Specifically, when uploading the main code, it ends up resetting the variables to 0.)
Renga in Blue 
Very nice article. Those were the days!
Looking forward to more of this!
This game is incredibly fascinating. I’ve done a bit of research on it, and here’s my general timeline:
Leedom couldn’t have been at the 1979 West Coast Computer Faire with Kim-venture. That show took place in May, and Leedom was just having his Kim Baseball game published around that time in issue 16 of 6502 User Notes newsletter, where it’s copyrighted April ’79. He only started working on Kim-venture after that had been published, and the original instruction manual/code listing for the game that he briefly sold himself is dated December, 1979. I think the confusion comes from his statement in Kevin Bunch’s interview, where he referenced the SF faire along with mentioning one more locally in Atlantic City, which had been having computer shows since 1976, when the Apple I was actually first shown there. It was most likely one of these (which were fairly small after ’76, until Comdex showed up in 1982), probably in early 1980 (not 1978, as he said, which is obviously not possible) that he attended with the game. I would guess that this is where the writer of the brief blurb about it in the March/April issue of Compute first caught wind of it. Leedom sold it himself briefly, mostly locally but also via mail, in those first few months of 1980, but by about May he had hooked up with Aresco, who while local to him were in fact a well-established company by that point, having advertised various products and literature in many of the major computer magazines since mid 1977. It was they who wrote the (quite funny) instruction manual that much of the game’s story comes from. They first “announced” Kim-venture in the June, 1980 issue of Personal Computing, and then followed up with a single ad in the July, 1980 issue of Creative Computing. So, while it was limited, it’s not true to say that it wasn’t traditionally published. By the time it got its lone review in the September, 1980 issue of Micro it seems that Aresco were beginning to wind down (they mostly disappear from the record after early ’81), and Leedom was starting to sell it himself again for a lower price. After this, he switched focus to the Apple II, and Kim-venture fell into deep obscurity until just a few years ago.
Regarding the TK-80 Yamato type-in from Ascii magazine, proper credit for that scan should go to the Star Blazers/Yamato fansite, Cosmo DNA, where it originally came from. As an aside, these Yamato-themed games were quite common in the burgeoning late ’70s Japanese computer scene, as both type-ins, homebrews advertised in the computer magazine classified ads, and cassettes sold locally at various computer shops. They were made not only on the various “one-board micoms” (as they liked to call them), but also the very early programmable calculators. Yamato-themed Star Trek variations were particularly popular, often called something like “Yamato Trek”. I’ve come across scores of them in my research, but it’s unclear at this time which was the first.
By the way, something weird I’d going on with WordPress comments. The only way I was able to enter this one was by trying to reply to another, and then canceling it. If you try to enter a new comment, it won’t accept any text input and then just freezes. This seems to be WordPress-wide, as I tested it on a couple of other blogs, with multiple browsers on my Android.
Bob is one of the friendliest Guys out there. Thank you for this good article.
You probably want to have “Farmer Brown” in one of the image captions; “Father Brown” would presumably be some kind of murder-solving game.
Rob is correct: it was a Computer Faire in Atlantic City that I attended, although I’m not sure what year it was. But I did indeed wear my “Ask me about KIM-Venture” T-shirt, and I think I sold a couple of copies. ARESCO had essentially given up marketing my game at that point, so I had a boxful of cassettes and game instructions on hand. And thanks, Nils, for letting me know about this blog! (Contact me using my first name at BobLeedom dot com.)
ok, so it was the _end_ of a a regular commercial publisher run — I’ll mention that on part 2 if you want to give any more details
I probably have more questions but I want to finish the game first! I do give every game on this blog an honest go.
Hope you’ve gotten past the dragon (hint: modeled on the dragon in the original Adventure).
Seeing Farmer Brown’s name as protagonist reminds me of an old rhyme from my schooldays:
“Farmer Brown is dead and gone
His face you’ll see no more.
For what he thought was H20
Was H2SO4.”