The Authoritative Website for Timex/Sinclair Computers
Last in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one, part two, part three. The first two pieces in this series were about hardware being designed now. This one is about hardware somebody already built, in some cases forty years ago, by people whose names we mostly do not have. Joe VandeZande brought three such
Third in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one, part two. The Timex Sinclair 2060 Bus Expansion Unit was not a rumor or a sketch. Timex showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1984, priced it at $120, and according to Bill Skyrme, who worked on it, had it
Second in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one is here. Consider what a Timex Sinclair 1000 actually gives you out of the box in 2026. One kilobyte. A membrane keyboard. No sound. No storage but a cassette deck you no longer own. And an RF modulator built for a television that has not
Eight of us from the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group took three tables at VCF Midwest 21 in Schaumburg on September 12 and 13. Joe VandeZande, Jeff Fetta, Peyton Bratton, Carl Miles, John Mark Mobley, Mark Martin, Evan Wright, Stewart Newfeld, David Green and me, plus assorted spouses and children who put up with us for
Pro/File +5 is Tom Woods‘ database for the TS2068, with later modifications by Robert Fischer. The BASIC program carries the interface — menus, editing, print formatting — and hands the slow work to a 2,046-byte machine-code module loaded at 63488 ($F800). That module does three things that cannot be done quickly in BASIC: search, pack
If you’ve ever had a ZX81/TS1000, TS1500, or TS2068 question and thought “I’m sure somebody on the list solved this years ago…”, you were probably right. The trouble was finding it. Mailing-list archives are a haystack: thousands of messages, no real structure, and in the case of the old Yahoo Group, a haystack that effectively disappeared
In 2003, Alvin Albrecht wrote a Minesweeper for the TS2068 in C, built with z88dk. Porting the Windows game to a Z80 was the easy half. The half he cared about was getting the computer to play it well, and to play it honestly: every move reasoned from the numbers on the board, never from
By late 1982, Timex Computer Corporation had a gap problem. The TS1000 had launched in July of that year and sold in extraordinary numbers, over a million units by some accounts, but it was showing its limitations fast. American consumers, unlike their British counterparts, had little patience for the machine’s aggravations: the membrane keyboard that
National Education Corporation (Irvine, California) had been selling vocational training by mail since 1946. When home computers became affordable, they saw a natural extension of their business. Timex was looking for the same thing from the other direction. Dan Ross, COO of Timex Computer Corporation, was vocal about the TS computers as educational tools. “Computers
There’s something quietly wonderful about discovering that other people have been building the same thing you’ve been building. Not exactly the same — differently the same. Same general idea, completely different priorities, completely different angles. Each one a window into the maker’s own preoccupations. I built Retro Pixel Converter over a few weeks, partly because
Whether you’re digging through TAP files from World of Spectrum, trying to understand how a vintage BASIC program works, building your own TAP files for an emulator, or just curious what’s on those old disk images — TS-2068 Disk Browser is a free, open-source desktop app that makes it easy. What Can You Do With