A Christmas Story About A Tiny TIM

By Joseph Watson

I am a retired software engineer. I still program microcontrollers for fun. These days I concentrate on Microchip’s PIC chips, especially the PIC18 series chips. I retired from professional work at the end of 2010 and this year, 2016, I will turn 71 years old toward the end of the year.

Many years ago in 1971 at the ripe old age of 25, I bought a used DEC PDP-8/s minicomputer and played with it for many an hour. I even made a bit of extra money on the side by writing programs for that machine. (Yes, I still have the PDP-8/s.)

Early in 1975, a friend of mine bought a MITS Altair 8800 kit and invited me to help him build it. I was glad to help. That computer uses an Intel 8080 CPU chip. We soon had that machine blinking its lights and making strange noises in a nearby radio, but the fun seemed pretty limited for a little while.
Then a couple of college students named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer using the hitherto unknown company name of MicroSoft. My friend laid out the cash for the 4-kilobyte version of that product and we were soon writing BASIC programs for fun. Then my friend added an additional 4 kilobytes of RAM to his Altair and bought the 8-kilobyte version of MicroSoft BASIC. We spent many pleasant evenings in his basement writing BASIC programs for his machine. (By the way, my friend still has his Altair computer.)
In the era of the mid-1970s, microprocessor chips were still quite new but were becoming more known. The question on every would-be computer hobbyist’s lips was the same, “Which microprocessor chip is better, the Intel 8080 or the Motorola 6800?” I drooled over such things but, at more than a hundred dollars each, the cost surely seemed high for just a single silicon chip.
As I recall, some 8 guys who had been involved in the Motorola 6800 development left that company and joined MOS Technology, a calculator chip manufacturer, where about September of 1975 they created the very clever and much less expensive (about $25) MOS Technology 6502 CPU chip. Needless to say, my drooling intensified.

My TIM system got its start when my wife gave me, as a 1975 Christmas gift, just what I wanted most, a brand new MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor chip, a 6530-004 TIM chip, and 8 2102 static RAM chips. A 2102 RAM chip stores a whopping 1024 bits, organized as 1024 x 1. Those RAM chips ran so hot that you could not begin to touch them when they were operating.
I had a clear plastic box that I thought would make a nice enclosure for my TIM project. I took a large old printed circuit board and carefully stripped all the old parts and traces off of it to create a solid surface upon which to mount most of my circuitry, sort of a fiberglass chassis. I built up a simple 5-volt power supply to power the system consisting of a 120VAC to 12.6VAC transformer, a fuse, 4 1N2071 diodes wired as a full-wave bridge rectifier, a 2000 MFD 40 VDC filter capacitor, and a 7805 5-volt regulator. A long piece of aluminum running the length of the front side of the plastic box serves as the heat sink for the reguator. See Fig 1.

The CPU and the TIM chips were installed on a small perf board that was then glued with epoxy cement standing on edge on the large board inside the box. Additional components on this CPU/TIM board include a couple of 7400 quad 2-input NAND gate chips that I scraped up, about 9 resistors, a few small capacitors, and a couple of transistors that were involved in transmitting and receiving the 20-milliamp current loop signals for the Teletype. See Figs 2 and 3.

The 6502 supports several methods of being clocked. One uses a very simple external RC circuit so I chose that one. I included a potentiometer in the RC circuit so I could adjust the clock speed if needed. Since the TIM uses an autobaud feature to determine the timing for the serial interfaces, the clock speed needed only to be relatively constant but not any particular speed. See Figs 2 and 3.

I included a couple of red LEDs on the CPU/TIM board to reveal the state in the interface current loops with the Teletype, one for the sending side and one for the receiving side. (By the way, when I built this, we only had red colored LEDs. I had seen my very first LED in 1971, just 5 years earlier.) See Figs 2 and 3.

Aside from the CPU, TIM chip, and the RAM chips, most of the parts in this machine were salvaged parts scrounged from other old equipment and my spare parts box. The power transformer came from a nearby Radio Shack store. The IC sockets were wire wrap sockets that I unwrapped from old prototype boards being thrown out where I worked. However, I had no wire wrap tool so everything in the TIM system was soldered point-to-point.
Three push buttons were installed through the top of the plastic box for Reset, NMI, and IRQ. For the most part, only the Reset button was ever used. I may have used IRQ a few times. See Fig 4.

I made a little fan to keep the whole thing cool. The fan consisted of a small DC motor with a homemade aluminum fan blade on it. Eventually, I determined that the fan was just way to small for the amount of heat generated in this plastic box so I removed the fan and started using an external fan to cool it. All that remains of the old fan idea is the hole where it used to be located. See Fig 5.

As with many TIM systems, mine was connected to an ASR-33 Teletype unit. (Yes, I still have the Teletype, too.) Therefore, 10 bytes per second was the blazing speed for printing and for loading a program via 8-channel punched paper tape. I brought the serial lines out to a 37-pin connector on the side of the box. (Only slight overkill there… a 37-pin connector with only 4 electrical connections needed. One never knows when one will find a need for 33 spare pins.) See Fig 6.

I brought all the spare I/O port lines out to a connector on the side of the plastic enclosure so I could easily attach experimental interface circuitry there. See Fig 6.
To maximize cooling for the blistering hot RAM chips, I stood them on end, hoping for a degree of chimney effect cooling. They were all mounted in sockets as were all the chips of the project. Right from the beginning, I allowed room for an additional 24 2102 RAM chips so the system could grow from 1 kilobyte to 4 kilobytes of RAM. Standing the RAM chips on end resulted in one of the oddest physical wiring tricks in anybody’s computer and which is, no doubt, evident in the photos. Notice that much of the RAM array wiring was done with bare wire. For most of the wire in this project and especially the RAM array wiring, I used telephone wire which is to this day, one of my favorite kinds of hookup wire when solid wire is the best choice. It was easily stripped to make the bare wires for the RAM array. See Figs 7 and 8.

Aside from the ICs being in their sockets and a few connectors to the outside world, virtually every interconnection in this machine is hard wired with no connectors. It is obvious to me by looking at it now that I built the CPU/TIM board and then glued it down expecting to never have to change anything on it. (I do see that I tacked a capacitor onto the back of it at some point.) Looking at it now, I am surprised by some of the construction methods I used at that early time in my life (I was 30 years old). We all learn a lot as we grow older.
One kilobyte is a pretty small memory in which to store one’s program so I soon added the 24 additional 2102 RAM chips resulting in a total of 4 kilobytes of RAM. But that also made the little computer run really hot as well. So I added a slide switch to the system to choose whether it should run with 1 kilobyte or 4 kilobytes of RAM. That switch simply turns the power on or off to the extra RAM chips, thereby sometimes making life easier on the poor 7805 that was struggling to supply power to all those hot chips. See Fig 9.
There is a 74154 4-line to 16-line decoder that is involved in address decoding for the RAM chips (and for the EPROM chip described below). See Fig 10.

One reason for extending the RAM was that I found out about the existence of Tom Pittman’s Tiny Basic for the 6502 which cost a very reasonable $5 at the time. I loaded that little integer BASIC system and played with it often. Tom’s implementation is very compact and much could be accomplished even in a mere 4 kilobytes.

I wrote a number of assembly language programs as well. Clearly, the best one I ever wrote was a program to control a large set of Christmas lights that I strung across the front of my house. Each evening while I was on my way home from work, my wife would place a carefully prepared paper tape into the Teletype reader, turn on the power to the entire system, press the system Reset button, and turn on the Teletype reader. The tape contained a Carriage Return character to allow the TIM to determine the baud rate. After that came a TIM command telling it to load. Then came the machine code for the Christmas light program. When loading completed, one final TIM command on the tape started the program to running and the Christmas lights did their thing. It was always fun to arrive home and see my Christmas lights doing their dance before I even arrived. I used this little computer to run my Christmas lights so many times that it became clear that it would be smart to store the Christmas light program in an EPROM chip instead of loading it every evening from a paper tape. So I then added another slide switch inside the machine to optionally disable the TIM chip and enable a 2716 EPROM (2 kilobytes) plus a 7420 dual 4-input NAND gate chip (probably for address decoding) tucked into a corner of the box. When switched to the Christmas light position, one only had to power up the computer and press the Reset button to get the lights to go. By the way, there is no power switch other than plugging in or pulling out the power cord. See Figs 11 and 12.

The 7400 series chips are plastic and one 2102 chip is plastic. (I think I had to replace one of the original 2102 chips later because it had a habit of dropping bits, hence the plastic one.) Every other chip, including the 6502 and the 6530-004 TIM chip, are ceramic chips.

Looking over this little system after all these years, I have rediscovered many things about it that I had forgotten, most of which I have mentioned above. There is one more thing that I find of interest and that is the date codes. The 6502 CPU chip has a date code of 4775 meaning it was manufactured just about 4 weeks before I received it for Christmas. The 6530-004 TIM chip has a date code of 5075 meaning it must have still been a little bit warm when I got it as it had been made a mere week or so before it found its way under my Christmas tree. See Figs 13 and 14.
For those in the know, one might ask if my 6502 CPU chip includes the ROR (Rotate Right) instruction. Frankly, I can no longer remember if it does or not. I do remember the discussions about the issue of the earliest 6502 chips not having it.

In my boxes with electronic parts I have many IC’s. Partly new bought, lots also rescued from obsolete boards. The 65XX parts present a large part in the microprocessor corner! Recent inventory revealed some unique and older types. So here I  present photos of unique 65XX IC’s in my collection, duplicates left out.
Some older ceramic IC’s are from photos from other sources, like the Jolt archive.
MOS Technology dated the IC’s with the number string WWYY, where WW is weeknumber padded with zero, and YY are the last two digits of the year.
Example is my oldest part is 6530, date 1476 white case, stamped week 14 year 1976. The youngest parts are Rockwell R6522s from 2007!  And the 65c102 dates 0843, which means 2008?
Other manufacturers reversed week and year, like the 6507 8222, year 1982, week 22.
IC’s in this gallery:6501AQ,65(S)(C)02, 6503, 6504, 6507, 6510,R65F11, 6520, 65(C)22, 6524, 6526 6530, 65(SC)32, 6540, 6545 6550, 65(C)51, 6569, 6581, 65C102, 65802, 65816, 8501, CO14806 , CM630P

6501aq

6502

CM630P

Bulgarian unofficial clone, pin compatible

6503

6504

6507

6510, 8501 (6510 equivalent of later Commodore C64)

6520

6521

R65F11

6522

6524 I/O + timer

6526 (CIA, mostly found in Commodore systems)

6530

See the 6530 page for more information



(in my KIM-1)


(in my KIM-1)


A 6530-005 (TIM without ROM program) as sold on ebay, obviously rebranded since the SY6530-005 text is still visible. Hard to see, but the Synertek date code also seems not to be 8114.

A 6530 TIM recently acquired:

A mystery 6530, image from IC seller

6532

6540

6545

6550

6551

6552

6569 Video

6581 SID

65C102

65802

65816

CO14806 Sally Atari 65C02

Terminal Interface Monitor, short TIM, with codename 6530-004, is a 6530 with a monitor program in the mask ROM.
No systems were sold by MOS around it, just a kit with manual and the IC.
The Jolts use a TIM IC, Micro Associates, who designed the jolts write the TOM monitor for MOS Technology and called TIM DEMON.
The DATAC 1000, a single-board computer based upon a 6502 and a TIM RRIOT, designed in 1976 by Philadelphia Area Computer Society club members Carmen DiCamillo and Roland James.
Many hobbyists build themselves 6502 SBCs around a TIM IC.

Information on this page:

• TIM Superjolt Simulator
• 6530-004 dissected
  • 6530-004 decapped
• A Christmas Story About A Tiny TIM
• THE-RC 41523 CPU-4
• TIM-1 SBC
• TIM-2

• Jolt and Superjolt, by Micro Associates and Synertek Systems
• The story of the TIM
• Functions of the TIM software in ROM
• TIM MOS folder and pricelist
• TIM Manuals
• TIM ROM and sources
• TIM bytes the Apple
• 3 articles from Micro journal on the TIM
• Article on how to expand TIM
• TIM and OSI 400
• Breakpoint routine for 6502s TIM
• Lunar Lander for TIM and Jolt

TIM DEMON Manuals

	MOS TIM folder with pricelist
	MOS TIM manual
	MOS TIM manual
	User manual in HTML format The OCR process has left some errors in the text

TIM sources

Here the machine readable and ready to assemble source, listing and binary  of TIM (Thanks Martin Hoffmann-Vetter)
Note that this contains a corrected version! While testing the TIM Simulator I found an error in the papertape loader LH command, the ; start of a record seems to be OCR’ed to ‘:.

The story of the TIM (from Ch.1.5 of  “On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore”)
The first development system offered by MOS, the TIM IC, was in kit form, which reduced the selling price to only $30. Since the unit was designed primarily to instruct the user on the workings of computer systems in general and the 6502 in particular, MOS Technology contracted Microcomputer Associates of Santa Clara, California to write the unit’s internal program. The two founders, Ray Holt and Manny Lemas, taught engineers how to use microprocessors. Peddle relates, “You have to understand how little the world knew of microprocessors in 1974, ‘75 and ‘76. There were guys making big money selling classes on microprocessors during that time.” Manny Lemas had worked for Peddle during his GE days, while Ray Holt had an impressive background working on the F-14 Tomcat project for the Navy.

The technicians developed the system in a special research area on the second floor of MOS Technology. The lab was a room within a room, with a large sign on the door in capital letters warning NO ADMITANCE. Inside, the team stared intently at oscilloscopes or sat over hot irons soldering components onto circuit boards. Small pieces of circuitry were scattered chaotically across the room. Since the 6502 microprocessor and supporting chipset contained almost everything necessary for a computer, the design was minimal. When assembled, it could be connected to a teletype machine or a computer terminal.
The biggest job was programming the built-in ROM code for the computer. This consisted of a debugger and monitor program, appropriately called the Demon. According to Peddle, Demon was programmed by Manny Lemas and Mike Quarter, who previously developed Peddle’s time-sharing system. The programmers used this time-sharing system to develop the code, which they burned into a 6530-004 RRIOT chip. This little powerhouse included RAM, ROM , I/O and timer capabilities.

The system was named simply. Peddle and his team liked acronyms, thus the Terminal Interface Monitor, or TIM was christened. TIM would begin a predilection at MOS Technology and Commodore for assigning friendly three-letter names to their products.
Those ordering the $30 development kit received the grey-ceramic 6530-004 chip and a manual consisting of 14 sheets of 11×17 paper, folded and stapled in the middle. Included in the manual were a suggested schematic, the TIM monitor commands, a few sample programs and a listing of the monitor code. It was up to the user to provide the resistors, transistors, capacitors, wire, and even the 6502 microprocessor.
Though receiving a computer in the form of a kit does not seem particularly user friendly now, hobbyists at the time clamored to build their own computer. Nonetheless, a good portion of the kits failed to operate upon completion. Rather than using a prepared circuit board, many buyers simply wire-wrapped the chips together on a piece of generic perf board or prototyping board, often termed a kludge board. After placing the required components on the board, builders hand wired the chips one pin at a time, resulting in a snarl of fine multicolored wires. Once the chips were in place, the user then had to construct or purchase a separate power supply for the TIM. Finally, the TIM was (as the name suggests) able to interface with a standard ASCII terminal or teletype machine.
As hoped, the do-it-yourself nature of the kits spawned familiarity with the products, and once hobbyists had invested time learning about the chip, they often remained loyal to the 6502. Many hobbyists ended up using their TIM computer as a small development system, since it was ideal for creating small programs. For their part, MOS Technology continued to sell TIM computer kits to diehard hackers, even after the Commodore acquisition. Ultimately, TIM was just a stepping-stone to developing and marketing a fully assembled computer.


Functions of the TIM software in ROM
• Self adapting to any terminal speed from 10-30 cps,
• Display and Alter CPU registers,
• Display and Alter Memory locations,
• Read and Write/Punch hexadecimal formatted data,
• Write/Punch BNPF format data for PROM programmers,
• Unlimited breakpoint capability,
• Separate non-maskable interrupt entry and identification,
• External device interrupts directable to any user location or defaulted to DEMON recognition,
• Capability to begin or resume execution at any location in memory,
• Completely protected, resident in Read Only Memory,
• Capability to bypass DEMON entirely to permit full user program
control over system,
• High speed 8-bit parallel input option, and
• User callable I/O subroutines.
DEMON’s Command Set Includes:
.R Display registers (PC,F,A,X,Y,SP)
.M ADDR Display memory (8 bytes beginning at ADDR)
: DATA Alters previously displayed item
.LH Load hexadecimal tape (socalled MOS papertape format)
.WB ADDR1 ADDR2 Write BNPF tape (from ADDR1 to ADDR2) (Intel papertape format)
.WH ADDR1 ADDR2 Write hexadecimal tape (from ADDR1 to ADDR2)
.G Go, continue execution from current PC address
.H Toggles high-speed-reader option (if it is on, turns it off; if off, turns on)
I know of several commercial systems using the TIM:
– The Jolt and Superjolt, Microcomputer Associates/Synertek (also information on the origin of the TIM-1 program!)
– the first Brutech BEM bus system, A small dutch company, Vinkeveen, that produced professional 6502/6809 and more, industrial systems.
– Datac 1000
Frank Wolf has decapped a TIM 6530-004 to study it and maybe do a FPGA clone.
Here the photo’s:

Expand your TIM

TIM BYTES THE APPLE

(Design by Fred Hatfield, scans and transcription by Tom Owad, https://www.applefritter.com/node/2833)
For those of you that would like to have hard copy capability and much better control over program development on the Apple 1, the following hardware addition will accomplish it.
Using a 6530-004 (‘TIM’ chip) costing about $12.00 gives many superb features such as a variable baud rate serial input/output, a high speed parallel input (high speed paper tape reader), an excellent breakpoint processor, paper tape dump and load routines, etc.
The TTY port is located at locations 6202H and 6203H. Date at that port should be 00H and 16H respectively. The baud rate is stored at 00EAH and 00EBH and 110 baud is represented by 10H and 46H at those locations. It’s a fun addition to the Apple 1. Try it!
Fred Hatfield K8VDU

Teletype connection schematic.


Teletype Pinouts (connections 6530-004 and Apple bus):

 
      TIM                 APPLE 
     6530-004             6502
        33        D0        33
        32        |         32
        31        |         31
        30        |         30
        29        |         29
        28        |         28
        27        \/        27
        26        D7        26
         5        A9        18
         6        |         17
         7        |         16
         8        |         15
        10        |         14
        11        |         13
        12        |         12
        13        |         11
        14        |         10
        15        AO         9
        16        RES       40
        17        IRQ        4
        1       - GND
       20 - +5V              -----------------------
        3 / PIN25           |  FRED HATFIELD K8VDU  |
          \ 6820            |                       |
       18 - +5V             |     7/77              |
                             -----------------------

---

TIM articles in the Micro journal in pdf format:
– Micro 1: Terminal Interface monitor (TIM), introduction and description, with am alternative system circuit diagram.
– Micro 3: TIM meets the S100 bus.
– Micro 9: Two short TIM programs. First a program to chage the baudrate, the second is a small operating system.

TIM and OSI 400

Application note by OSI how to add a TIM to an OSI 400 board.

Breakpoint routine for 6502s

Lunar Lander for TIM