> This email is intended for Paul Lamar. If you're not Paul Lamar then I
 > apologize for the intrusion and please disregard.
 >
 >
 > Paul,
 >
 > I stumbled across your website during a google search for information on
 > the SuperKIM. References to the SuperKIM are few and far between on the
 > web. Being an avid collector of vintage technology and a former SuperKIM
 > owner I was compelled to contact you. My interest in the SuperKIM was
 > recently rekindled when I saw one on ebay.
 >
 > In the late 70's I was engaged in the development of motion control
 > systems for use in the animation and special effects industry at a
 > company in Northridge, CA. At that time there were commercially
 > available systems for such work but they were based on PDP-11s and
 > prohibitively expensive. We began experimenting with KIM-1s to control
 > several stepping motors which drove cameras and various mechanical
 > actuators. Like you, I didn't really know what an assembler did and
 > generated all of our code by hand in hex for manual entry into the KIM.
 > I began experimenting with the MOS 6522 chip and was able to generate
 > motor control signals and track motor position, which was critical to
 > our application. At some point one of my colleagues showed me an
 > advertisement for the SuperKIM (I don't recall which publication) and we
 > decided to make the road trip to Redondo Beach to check it out. To this
 > day I remember that visit to your shop and the feeling that we were on
 > the bleeding edge of a technological revolution. We purchased a SuperKIM
 > and, eventually, an AIM-65 as a development system. For the next couple
 > of years we produced numerous film projects using our SuperKIM-based
 > system which aired throughout the US and internationally.
 >
 > I want to thank you for your contribution to the early years of embedded
 > computing and the motion picture special effects industry.
 >
 > Sincerely,
 >
 > Rob Burton
 > Toronto, ON
 >
 >
 > P.S. - I hope I win the ebay auction for the SuperKIM. I have KIM-1's
 > and and AIM-65, but the SuperKIM would really really round out the
 > collection.
 >
 >
 > Your welcome Rob.

 > Yep that's me Rob. I just threw out a whole box of Kim 1 manuals.
 > I have lots of doc left. Included is a complete set of 6502 Micro
magazines.
 > I have a ton of stuff including SK printed circuit art work and Kim 1
ROMS.
 > There are some unpopulated SK PC boards as well. Many chips. I would
like to get
 > rid of it but I can't bring myself to throw it out yet. I need the
room however.
 >
 > http://www.rotaryeng.net/RT1.pdf
 >
 > It is getting cold up there. If you can come out to California
 > you can gather up a lot of stuff and take it back with you.
 > I'll sell you everything I have for $500 U.S.. You can stay in the
apartment
 > above my hangar for free for a couple of days. 10 minutes from the beach.
 > Pick out what you want. Bring a truck :)
 >
 > One of my very young ex employees Steve Linn developed a machine that
converted
 > 35 mm film to video in real time. Prior to that it cost over a
million to
 > convert a film movie to video. He got to be a millionaire before he
was 30.
 > Steve learned 6502 assembler when he was 14.
 >
 > I'll be gone to London (UK) :) for a few days next week so make it
later than that.
 >
 > Paul Lamar

Dear Paul:

Rob Burton wrote:  "In the late 70's I was engaged in the development of
motion control systems for use in the animation and special effects
industry at a company in Northridge, CA."

There was only one animation and special effects company of note in
Northridge, CA in the late 1970's: an obscure outfit called "Industrial
Light and Magic".

Rob Burton wrote: "For the next couple of years we produced numerous
film projects using our SuperKIM-based system which aired throughout the
US and internationally."

Around that time, there are some little-known titles that used
motion-control, such as "Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope" (1977), and
 "Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back" (1980).

On iMDB.com, Mr. Burton's filmography lists other, small, ILM
motion-control films such as:
 - Short Circuit 2
 - Total Recall
 - The Mask
And, as part of DreamQuest Images:
 - The Rock
 - Con Air
 - Armageddon

So, Paul, yes, your SuperKIM really, really "done good."  I also thank you.

Les Nordman

I remember Con Air well. Also Total Recall but I cannot remember what it was about. Looking it up on Google refreshes my memory. Our current governor starred in it :) Good movie.

As I recall the system was a large 3D cable system that translated  or "flew" a gyro stabilized film camera around. Four cables went up to tall poles on the edges of the field. The tension on the cables was tailored by computer controlled winches. For example you could chase or lead a football player from close up across the field from just above him. I don't know for sure if this is the same outfit. I am not sure about this as we were a Sage/Stride 68000 computer dealer later on and that may have been a Sage/Stride application.

Paul Lamar

Ha! So you're checking my credentials.

IMDB.com lists my later work, as it's mostly interested in theatrical
motion pictures. I did plenty of that at places like ILM, Dream Quest
Images, and Disney between 1980 and 1996. When I was working with the SK
in the late 70's I was at a small firm called Calico Creations. We had
found a lucrative market in television motion graphics: TV station IDs,
network logos, talk show titles, advertising, etc. We had a crack team
of young graphics designers who were constantly thinking up more
complicated ways to fly logos around on the screen. We were known in
advertising circles for our unique artistic "look" which was achieved by
making multiple exposures on each frame of film, each using a
combination of artwork and optical filters. Typically the artwork had to
move around (or "animate") so we had to repeat the same motion precisely
for each exposure "pass". When I arrived at the company this was being
done manually using traditional animation camera rigs, which are
conceptually similar to vertical milling machines with a camera in place
of a cutting tool. For each frame of film the camera operators
painstakingly positioned each axis using cranks, knobs, and mechanical
counters, for each exposed frame of film. Once a pass was complete they
moved everything back to the starting position, rewound the film,
changed the artwork/filters, and did it all over again. Sometimes this
process was repeated 40 or 50 times to create the desired look. Five
seconds of film could easily take an entire day to shoot. If they made a
mistake on any frame of any pass the entire day's work was ruined. This
application was just begging for automation!

Initially I outfitted one of the camera rigs with stepping motors and
lashed up a KIM-1 to generate motor control signals. This approach
worked but was limited so I began experimenting with the 6522s to
generate and count motor pulses. I prototyped a 4-chip 6522 board for
the KIM-1 and was experimenting with it when I discovered the SK. The
SK's 6522s and priority interrupts allowed me to generate 4 axes of
motion with real-time velocity control and relatively low CPU overhead.
As this point I was still assembling code by hand and had devised paper
forms similar to yours to assist in that process. Eventually we
purchased a AIM-65 which a real assembler and wrote some BASIC enabling
the operators to create their own motion programs. Around 1984 a
gentleman by the name of Bill Tondreau came forward with a CP/M-based
system that eventually became the industry standard and we abandoned our
proprietary SK-based systems. Bill went on to port his technology to the
new IBM-PC platform and eventually received an Oscar for his
contribution to the field.

Today, almost all of the special effects techniques that relied on that
technology have been obviated by computer graphics. Now I wrangle a herd
of bright, young software engineers who's introduction to computer
technology began with the IBM-PC or the Amiga. They have no idea what
it's like to fit code into 4K of RAM or have ever had to bit-bang a
peripheral device.

I appreciate your offer for accommodations and access to the SK
"museum".  I get out to LA a couple of times per year and will likely be
there in the next few months. I'll drop you a line when I'm going to be
in th area.


Thanks, again.

Rob Burton

Thank you Rob,

I am thrilled to have that stuff go to a worthy home.
That 6522 was one powerful chip for it's day. The eight latched
priority interrupts were a very powerful SK feature not available
on any single chipper that I know of to this day.

One of the tricky features of our SK based road test system was the ability to do floating point multiply in real time without traditional hardware math chips.
These chips were not available at that time anyway. They had not been invented yet. For example: we had 100 pulses per foot coming in from a fifth wheel sensor. Lets say the car was going 50 FPS. That is 5000 pules per second. If you had a 6522 counting those pulse, then hardware interrupt the counter every .01000 seconds, read it, store it, clear it and re-enable it you could display the FPS to the nearest .01 FPS directly on a digital read out refreshed 100 times a second. For MPH this was done with another 6522 counter hardware interrupted every  0.00682 seconds. It would then read out MPH directly. The data was also sent to a printer driver printing it in the background as the data was being acquired.

The early unit had a 1 MHZ crystal so our real time  clock resolution was one microsecond. What was amazing this thing would work up to 200 MPH.  Later 2nd gen units ran at 2 MHZ which gave us half a microsecond resolution.

This feature is what so fascinated the Phd's at LASL :) This prompted them to coauthor a paper with me for the IEEE:

"Microprocessor-Based System for Roll-Down and Acceleration Tests
by D.K. Lynn, C.R. Derouin, and Paul Lamar
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Published in IEEE Proceedings 29th Vehicular Technology Conference
Arlington, Illinois, March 28-30, 1979"

Road & Track loaned the equipment to Burt Rutan to measure the critical take off accleration of the around the world non-stop Voyager aircraft.

BTW Mazda USA also bought an early system.

I owe a lot of this to my wife Rhonda Rayha at the time who supported me for a year when I was writing the original code, designing the hardware and I had no income. Thank you again Rhonda. You are now world famous :)

Paul Lamar