3
http://www.kim-1.com/usrman.htm
The First Book of KIM (otherwise known as FBOK)
The User Manual was great, but lacked any useful programs, so a bunch of early KIM
users gathered dozens of good programs and bundled them as the First Book of KIM.
If you owned a KIM, you owned a FBOK.
Again, many copies are on-line, such as:
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/The%20First%20Book%20of%
20KIM.pdf
Both of these appear on eBay and Amazon, usually at crazy prices, but sometimes
you’ll find them at reasonable prices.
FBOK in the KIM Clone
If you’ve looked through FBOK, you might have noticed a couple fun programs that
we put into the KIM Clone EEPROMs. At address 1800 is Lunar Lander, and at 1803
is Farmer Brown. Read the instructions first, then run them with these sequences of
key strokes:
Lunar Lander
[AD] [1] [8] [0] [0] [GO]
This was always a hit when family came over to visit and see what my computer
could do. Remember that very, very few people had computers back then so being
able to play a game was typically the first experience most people had back then
with a computer they could see and touch.
As Lunar Lander is running, the leftmost four digits are the altitude while the two
right digits are the current speed. The goal is to land with a speed of 5 or less, while
not using all your fuel. You can see your fuel by pressing the F key, then switch back
to altitude with the A key.
My late brother-in-law Glenn used to work on landing with the fewest number of
keystrokes, the ultimate goal being able to land with one or two. I can’t remember
whether he ever achieved his goal, but here is a three-key sequence that works
nicely for me:
