The Timex Sinclair 2068: Was it too little, too late?

What can you say about a new computer that’s about a year and a half behind the times? I grew up in the old “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” school of thought — I didn’t always believe it then, and I don’t now — not when it’s your money that’s at stake.

The Timex/Sinclair 2068 has some interesting roots. It was developed as a follow-up to the TS 1000, and its somewhat larger (expanded memory) brother, the 1500. Both were monochrome (black and white) units, both were inexpensive for their time, and neither was of much real use to its owner, essentially as a result of its ridiculous, undersized membrane keyboard, and its poor RF modulated video signal. The 2068 was developed by genius (no, I’m not kidding) Clive Sinclair, the same man who brought out electronic calculator kits years ago, for a fraction of the cost of any other; the man who brought out what was, for its time, the smallest truly portable TV set; the man who brought out a hundred dollar computer at a time when the next lowest priced computer sold for around $300. When it was developed in England a few years back, Sinclair’s color computer was called the Spectrum.

Having been successful overseas, Timex decided to try its chances in the United States. The computer was dubbed “Timex/Sinclair 2000,” and shown at last year’s Consumer Electronics Shows. The 2000 received a bad reaction from the press, largely as a result of its undersized keyboard, which, if I recall correctly, lacked a space bar, among other things. The 2000 was retooled, a larger keyboard was devised, and was renamed the 2068.

From what I can tell, however, the innards are virtually the same as the 2000. In fact, if you don’t look at the cover of the user manual, you’d quickly discover that you’re reading the 2000 user’s manual. It’s obvious that this machine was developed for a market that no longer exists — the market of at least a year ago (a market that was paying $300 for a membrane-keyboard Atari 400, with only 16K of memory, and lacking a built-in BASIC).

Enough knocks for now. Let’s look at the computer. The 2068 is an attractive unit, measuring roughly 15″ by 7″ by 1 inch. At the right side of the top of the case, a cover lifts up, exposing the “Timex Command Cartridge” slot. When you lift this slot, you have access to a jack for plugging in the preprogrammed ROM cartridges. At the left side of the device is a rubber (“Chiclet”) keyboard, which is about a third smaller than a standard keyboard. On either side of the unit are Atari-compatible joystick ports, on the left side is the power switch. At the rear of the unit is a power jack (a large power supply, with a long cord), a TV output jack and a monitor jack, and ear and microphone jacks for connection to a tape recorder. Concealed behind a pop-out cover is the connector bus, for connecting peripherals (so far, only a printer is available — maybe) to the main processor.

The jacks at the rear follow a somewhat strange convention. With most devices, the part marked MIC (for microphone) plugs into the earphone jack on the recorder you are using to record from (in other words, if you wanted to record through your computer’s microphone, you have to get output from the tape recorder). Apparently, someone at Timex either got their labels confused, or thought that the purchaser wouldn’t be able to figure out that the MIC cable will terminate at the earphone jack, and vice versa. In any case the cable from the MIC jack on the 2068 goes to the MIC jack on the cassette recorder, and the same goes for the EAR jack.

For the typist, the keyboard is an ingeniously devised torture device. In their attempt to use as few keys as possible, the designers have assigned five functions to most of the keys. They also seemed to feel that it was important to move many punctuation keys away from their normal positions on the keyboard (colon is on the “z” key, quotation marks are on the P key, etc.). For three of those five functions, extra keystrokes are required. The damned thing is so complicated that they include a separate chapter on how to use the keyboard, and also include a cassette tutorial. With the trend towards “plug it in and use it” gaining momentum in computer design, the 2068 seems to be a giant fall backward.

The Timex approach to the keyboard had some misguided good intentions. What they attempted to do is give the keyboard some smarts — by pressing a single key, entire words could be printed onto the screen. Theoretically, this could save some programming time. In fact, this approach has been taken by some competitive manufacturers and experienced programmers, who defined certain control-plus character combinations to represent often used phrases (LIST, GOTO, etc.). On the 2068, however, they attempted to make the keyboard do too much. As a result, it doesn’t work at all well.

For example, if you want to type in a comma or colon (very common characters in most BASIC programs), you must hold down a SYMBOL SHIFT key, and find the character you want on the keyboard — you are almost required to take your eyes off what you’re doing to make sure you find the right key. To delete a character or keyword, a backspace is too simple — with the 2068 CAPS SHIFT plus 0 does the trick. What was probably intended to be a timesaver, really isn’t. If you can survive the hours of torture it takes to learn the keyboard, it may be barely adequate for your needs.

Ads for the 2068 identify it as being a 72K machine. This figure probably includes about 16K for the video processor, possibly an equal number for the keyboard control and basic, and around 4K of ROM (although these figures aren’t available). The 72K 2068 is probably more like a 48K machine. The 2068 is capable of generating only 8 colors, a full alphabet and some limited character sets. The 2068 displays 256 x 176 pixels, translated to 32 x 24 available for text entry and programming. At this stage of development, that is fair resolution, but little to get really excited about.

So how does it work? I’ve already mentioned that the keyboard is a real pain— the multitasking of the keys opposes any efforts to do serious keyboarding. The 2068 does, indeed, generate 8 colors, however, in order to see the correct colors I had to readjust my monitor (this readjustment made all the colors generated by my other equipment look quite a bit off — if you are using your family TV set with the 2068, it may also require readjustment and may turn all your TV programs into weird colors).

The few programs I had the patience to input seemed to work well. The 2068 has some fairly sophisticated graphics and sound commands, allowing you to plot graphs, draw “circles” (semicircles or oval shapes, depending on the parameters you set). Borders, screen color, and type color can be set by the programmer. Although there are only a few preprogrammed graphics characters, you can also design your own graphics characters.

The 2068 has three voices, three noise channels, and allows you control over ten waveforms. Although it takes a bit of number crunching, you have pretty good control over the sound output. While we’re on the subject of sound, the fact that sound doesn’t come through your TV set or monitor is an important one. Aside from the Apple and PC computers, sound is designed to come through your TV or monitor speaker. This allows you to adjust the volume, and usualy sounds better than the tinny little speaker that is built into most computers. If you want to go through the trouble, you can connect a jack to the earphone output of the computer. This may be fine for a monitor, but if you have a TV set, you’ll probably just have to sit and listen to your computer to beep at you.

The manual is well-written, guiding you through increasingly difficult material as you learn basic programming (or fine tune yourself on this machine). The manual is probably the best thing about the 2068.

If you’re going to spend the $200 or so that they want for this computer, you should know about its potential, in terms of support, expansion and other important matters. Primarily as a result of its general weaknesses (terrible keyboard and on-computer sound), the 2068 will probably do very poorly competing against such venerable devices as the Commodore 64 and Atari 600XL. And the expected slow sales of the 2068 won’t attract the necessary third party developers to fully support the machine with improved software and peripherals. You will, therefore, have to be content with whatever Timex chooses to release for its computer.

At present, the only data storage device is a tape recorder (any good quality portable cassette machine should work). Input and output are alow, and the computer is relatively sensitive to variations in volume and tone settings. It takes a few trial runs to set the recorder up for proper loading into the computer. A 40-column printer (the 2040) should be available soon. If you don’t mind printouts on adding machine paper, the 2040 should be okay for you. However, if you intend to do word processing, neither the keyboard nor printer will be of much value.

A disk drive has been hinted at by Timex, but I doubt whether anyone will see any point in bringing out such a device for a computer as limited as the 2068. A whole line-up of titles of cassette software and Command Cartridge programs has been provided by Timex, although I still haven’t seen any.

Timex is a big company. They have a lot of money to support the 2068. However, my guess is that they’ll initially release a small selection of titles, and soon stop development of any more. Although Timex has a lot of money, they aren’t dumb enough to throw good development bucks into an unsuccessful product.

Finally, how well does the 2068 play games? There are no surprises here. The sample cassette games were not particularly good. Timex is nothing, if not consistent. Graphics were amateurish, game play as well as sound effects were dull. This could be a result of poor programming or general equipment limitations.

My recommendation is this: If you are seriously thinking about buying a Timex 2068 — think again. If you want your kids to stop wanting a computer, get them this one.