Whilst my main interest is with early Acorn computers I also have an interest in the Rockwell AIM 65, this being the machine I would have dearly loved to own when I was at college at the end of the 1970's. I was in Brighton and as luck would have it the UK distributor (Pelco Electronics) was not too far away in Hove so one day I jumped on a bus and made my way to see it ! I vaguely remember it was just a small office but I was able to have a play with a machine. Sadly it was not to be though, the basic machine was £250 and then you had to add on extras like BASIC and the Assembler.
The AIM 65, or Advanced Interactive Monitor 65, was introduced by Rockwell in 1978 it followed on from the MOS KIM-1 and Synertek SYM-1 computers sharing the same expansion connectors however it had a 20-character 16-segment display, proper QWERTY keyboard and built-in thermal printer.
The basic machine comes with an 8K Monitor and 1K of RAM (2114's) but has additional sockets for expansion, the RAM to 4K and a further four 4K ROM sockets allowing the addition of an 8K BASIC Interpreter and 4K Assembler as well as several other languages - see this page AIM 65 Software.
I now have three AIM 65's which can be seen here - My Rockwell Collection.
Memory Map
Hardware
Here's one version of the schematic:
The AIM 65 has good expansion capability via the two edge connectors - Expansion (J3) and Application (J1).
I am sure there where probably dozens of boards that could be plugged into the Expansion port however I have just two, a couple of PROM programmers. However I think the best way to expand the machine is to connect it to an RM 65 Rack System as there was an extensive range of boards available for that system, I have collected a number of these plug-in cards but have never seen a rack so had to make my own version of an RM rack. See my AIM 65 Expansion page for more info.
