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able to get us a handful of 8008s … It was really a neat trip. We
spent two weeks in California. I just kind of followed him along
since he seemed to know all these people … We came away with
a dozen or so 8008s and brought them back to Kingston.”
During the trip, Kutt and Rea learned about the
SIM
8-01
prototyping board, a development aid analogous to the
SIM
4-
01 but aimed at applications involving the new 8008 proces-
sor. Intel planned to introduce the 8008 microprocessor into
the market in early 1972. It was only natural that the marketing
strategy developed around the
SIM
4 and
MP
7 products should
be adopted for the marketing of the 8008 chip. The result was
the
SIM
8-01 microcomputer - designed, laid out, and provided
with software by Hoff's Applications Research Group. “We
originally designed it as a demo,” remembered Hal Feeney, the
main engineer working on the 8008 chip, “and we published the
[
SIM
8-01] circuit in the early 8008 user's manual.” Unlike the
SIM
4, the purpose of the new
SIM
8 board was not to resolve
the problem of interfacing the microprocessor with
EPROM
s;
the 8008 was designed to operate with standard semiconductor
memories, including the
EPROM
s.
A month after Kutt and Rea's visit to Intel,
KSI
received a
SIM
8-01 development system and Intel's new
EPROM
program-
mer - the
MP
7-02 - again, at no cost to
KSI
. Kutt handed the
SIM
8-01 hardware to Laraya for evaluation and an estimation
of the potential for building an
APL
machine around it. Regard-
less of the
SIM
8's intended application as a development and
demonstration system, and not as a general-purpose computer,
the board was indeed a rudimentary 8008-based microcom-
puter. Laraya recalled: “Mers brought it [the
SIM
8-01] in and
said, 'Here, see what it does.' It was really computing, it really
did things, one little chip.”
In mid-1972, the
SIM
8's schematic diagram, included in the
MCS
-8 User's
Manual
, was the only published design of an 8-bit
computer with a single-chip
CPU
. It was inevitable that the
