[Casey Bralla] acquired his palms on a Rockwell AIM 65 microcomputer, a incredible instance of classic computing from the late 70s. It sports activities a full QWERTY keyboard, and a twenty character vast show complemented by a small thermal printer. The keyboard is remarkably snug, however doing software program growth on a one-line, twenty-character show is simply not anybody’s concept of a superb time. [Casey] made his personal instruments to let him write applications on his primary PC, and switch them simply to the AIM 65 as a substitute.
Shifting knowledge wasn’t as easy in 1978 as it’s immediately. Whereas the Rockwell AIM 65 is a superb machine, it has no disk drive and no filesystem. Applications could be written in assembler or BASIC (which had ROM assist) however getting them into working reminiscence the place they may execute is just not so simple as it’s on trendy machines. One can sort a program in by hand, however nobody desires to try this twice.
Thankfully the AIM 65 had a tape interface (two, really) and will learn and retailer knowledge in an audio-encoded format. Slightly than typing a program by hand, one might play an audio tape as a substitute.
That is the angle [Casey]’s instruments take, within the type of two Python applications: one for encoding into audio, and one for decoding. He can write a program on his primary desktop, and encode it right into a .wav file. To load this system, he units up the AIM 65 then hits play on that very same .wav file, sending the audio to the AIM 65 and basically automating the method of typing it in. We’ve seen individuals emulate classic tape drive {hardware}, however the method of merely encoding textual content to and from .wav information is way more becoming on this case.
The audio encoding format Rockwell used for the AIM may be very well-documented however no instruments existed that [Casey] might discover, so he made his personal with the assistance of Anthropic’s Claude AI. The outcomes have been nice, as Claude was capable of learn the documentation and, with [Casey]’s course, generate working encoding and decoding instruments that carried out the spec completely. It went so swimmingly he even went on to additionally make a two-pass assembler and supply code formatter for the AIM, as nicely. With them, growth is much friendlier.
Watch an illustration within the video [Casey] made (embedded beneath the web page break) that reveals the encoded knowledge being transferred at a screaming 300 baud, earlier than being run on the AIM 65.
