Mike,
Not free, but at cost. They wanted us all to play with them. There were soon "G-Job" designs for power supplies and cases. The company bought a license from a little outfit called Microsoft for their ROM BASIC that we called "buggy basic".
But when the Commodore PET came out, most of us abandoned the AIM 65. However the AIM 65 led a long life as one of the first uP based industrial controllers.
-Dave
Yeah, I'd heard (maybe even from you ?) that they offered deals to the appropriate employees; I take it you don't have one?
In some ways they had more going for them than the PET:
-more memory possible (40K instead of 32)
-RS-232 instead of IEEE
-more I/O ports
-different languages available in ROM (BASIC, FORTH, PL/65, Assembler)
-built-in little printer.
Forget the single-line, 20 character paradigm and hook up an 80x25 terminal and you had a respectable little computer, underappreciated in my view. I used them quite a bit (and still have a few) and am always looking for fellow aficionados.
Ideal for driving a paper tape perforator, BTW (to bring this on topic ;-) )