The Chicago Consumer Electronics Show

TIMEX had a fantastic booth. A number of Muppet-type puppets appeared on a CRT and interacted with a running dialogue with the passers by. Needless to say, large crowds sporadically gathered. When questions were asked about TIMEX products, other CRTs would light up and commercial-type explanations were given.

About 10 each of the new TS-1500s and TS-2000s were available for hands-on demonstration. The appearance of all the new TIMEX equipment is a silver-grey metallic in color, including the 2040 printer (the versions sold now are black).

The 1500 uses the European Spectrum case, but it is silver instead of black. The keys are a soft rubber that is touch-sensitive and very pleasant to work with. These are real keys and not the membrane type of the 1000. The response time is the same, however. There is 16K of RAM internal and the 16K rampacks can be plugged in the back for a total of 32K – no POKEing required to get the full 32K.

Otherwise, the computer is identical to the 1000 in every way but one. We had a 1500 on loan at our shop and tried to load some 1000 programs into it. No dice I We fooled around with the volume adjustment and just couldn’t get the program to load. It loaded with no problem on a 1000.

The 2000 is a different story. My original belief that this will be the PEOPLE’S COMPUTER was not swayed. What a beautiful machine. I witnessed some fast moving color graphics adventure games with sound that would rival any of the competition’s products at a fraction of the cost.

It comes in two versions. The 2048 will have 24K of ROM and 16K of user RAM. It will have an on-board cartridge interface in the form of a door on the lower right-hand corner of the keyboard. 42 keys, automatic repeat, one-touch keyword entry, reset key, 16 keyboard graphics symbols, 21 user definable keyboard graphics, two separate program selectable 32 by 24 character line displays with a regular color TV set. This means that the screen can be split either vertically or horizontally with each section having 24 lines with 32 characters per line. Pixel resolution is 256 X 192.

A 64 by 24 character line display can be achieved when the 2000 is used with a monitor, and pixel resolution is increased to 512 by 192. This high resolution/split screen feature is not available with the SPECTRUM – nor is the cartridge interface.

We learned (not from Timex) that that the color monitor they are negotiating for will have a 13 inch screen and sell for around $200.00 to the consumer.

There are 8 colors and 4 sound channels, each programmable to 8 octaves. It comes with peripheral ports to accommodate a cassette recorder, 2 joysticks, the cartridge software and an expansion connector which will interface the mini-drives that are supposed to be available sometime next year.

The second version is called the TS/2068 and is the same as the first but has 48K of internal RAM. If you add this to the 24K of ROM, you will notice that the computer has 72K of addressability which is beyond the 64K addressability of the Z-80 processor. TIMEX has jumped on the multiplexing bandwagon.

We did a benchmark test of the speed of the 2000 compared to the 1000 and found it to operate 6.3 times as fast as the 1000 in the SLOW mode. This is the same speed that the 1000 operates at while in the FAST mode. There is no FAST or SLOW modes with the 2000. It acts as if it is in the FAST mode without losing the screen display.

The cartridges come with up to 56K and displace 8K of the existing ROM. It should be interesting to see what a bulked-out 56K program can do on that machine, particularly if it leaves little user RAM like a Chess game. Ought to be pretty powerful.

I have compared the 2000 to the Sinclair SPECTRUM and the 2000, in my opinion, is the better machine with more features. Projected prices for the 2048 and 2068 are to be 149.95 and 199.95. Our sources put them at 99.95 and 149.95 within a few months after introduction .