Timex-Sinclair TS1000
From: Chuck Darling
April 24, 2025
I bought a Timex-Sinclair TS-1000
in 1983.
I paid $30 dollars for it at K-Mart.
My children's uncle was an Electronics Tech, ( he went to. Hutch Tech, also...)
He bought the 1k ZX81 for $79 dollars as a kit, the year before.
He was frustrated that he paid more than twice what I did, and mine came with 2k, assembled !
The Timex Sinclair was a Z80 machine,
an outgrowth of the 8080 architecture.
It had more instructions, and was faster.
The Radio Shack TRS-80 was also a Z80 Machiñe.
The Sinclair had a tokenized internal Basic, and came with 2K of memory.
It used your cassette recorder for storage,
and your TV set for a monitor screen.
2k of memory is very tiny, but with the
Sinclair Basic, you could write a 4 screen
program ... ( about 90 lines of BASIC )
I bought a 16k ram-pack, ($49) and never ran out of memory.
I bought a surplus TI 99/4a Keyboard,
and began to rewire it to match the Timex
keyboard matrix.
.I also bought a flea-market old IBM electric typewriter, and I was considering how
to build a solenoid matrix to drive the typewriter keys. If I built it adjustable,
I might have been able to drive a keypunch,
for my CS 113. Pascal course.
But, solenoids were not easily obtainable,
and I didn't want to bulk purchase them
without getting a few of them to test...
(I thought of building them myself...)
Then I bought my
- C64 with printer and diskette.
As you can see, the Timex-Sinclair was indeed an expandable 64k 8-bit computer.
It would have been much more dominant,
If the Commodore 64 didn't kill it.
The Magazines of the early '80s published games, technical articles, and provided the
kind of marketplace that YouTube does now.
But a YouTube Computer Video usually
provides only one sponsor, unlike the
Hundreds that appeared monthly in
SYNC magazine, Timex-Sinclair User,
Computer Magazine, and Byte.
And those magazines put those programs
right in your hand, and all of the Ads had
everything you needed to contact and purchase, printed out right there ...
There was a Forth language for the Timex,
There were even versions of Pascal available for the (64k) Timex.
I would have built mine into a full 8-bit
System, but the Commodore 64 at $89
dollars was too good to pass up. It had
a 3- voice synthesizer, a diskette, and tons
of software. And I saved the expense
of all the home-brew upgrades...
BASIC ASTEROIDS
50 REM "A"
100 LET A$="*"
105 LET N=0
110 LET A=0
115 LET B=0
120 LET C=0
125 LET D=0
130 LET T=1
135 LET X=12
160 LET R=INT (RND*27)
170 PRINT AT 21,R;A$
180 SCROLL
190 SCROLL
200 LET N=N+T
205 IF N=100 THEN LET A$="\.'\. "
210 IF N=104 THEN LET T=2
215 LET E=D
220 LET D=C
230 LET C=B
240 LET B=A
250 LET A=R
255 PRINT AT 9,X-2;" "
260 PRINT AT 11,X;"\'.\.'"
270 IF X>=E-2 AND X<=E+T THEN GOTO 500
280 IF INKEY$="5" THEN LET X=X-T
290 IF INKEY$="8" THEN LET X=X+T
300 GOTO 160
500 PRINT AT 11,X-1;"CRASH"
510 PRINT AT 0,0;"SCORE=";N
520 CLEAR
530 PAUSE 100
540 FAST
55
0 CLS
560 SLOW
570 RUN
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