The Kenbak-1 is a computer by John Blankenbaker, from 1971(!).
What makes it so interesting?
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It predates the home computer revolution by several years (six!).
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The Kenbak-1 is considered to be the world's first commercially available personal computer.
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It was made out of TTL logic ICs, without any kind of microprocessor (no 6502, no Z80).
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The 256 bytes of memory were integrated via two serial shift registers that "simulated" delay line memory.
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The whole computer had a serial architecture.
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The official documentation is high quality, it includes complete schematics, a state diagram, detailed explanations of the inner workings, example programs and a programming tutorial.
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The whole thing was more or less a very impressive "one man show" by John Blankenbaker!
There are a bunch of emulators and rebuilds of the Kenbak-1 available.
What does this implementation offer?
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It is based on the state machine from the official documentation by John Blankenbaker.
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RhinoKen is written in C, only. It is therefore highly portable (e.g., I made a kind-of replica, based on an ESP-32 microcontroller).
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This repository includes a
main.cwith a simple terminal-based user interface for the Windows operating system (simple to port to e.g. Linux). -
A simple assembler is included, state is work-in-progress.
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The emulator implementation is kind of "educational", there are a lot of infos from the official documentation of the Kenbak-1 included in the code.