Jim Payne was one of many small, cottage industry supporters of Timex/Sinclair computers. He wrote several programs for the 1000 and 2068 and started a mail order business to sell them after Timex exited the market in 1984.
It was a totally different world back then, in the late 70s, early 80s. I had always wanted a personal computer in the late 70s, but money didn’t allow it. When Sinclair started selling the ZX-80 and the ZX-81, it caught my attention. The first one I actually got was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I still have it; It’s on my desk at work. People ask “is it a calculator?” When I tell them it’s a computer, they don’t quite believe me.
I got the Timex 1000 and taught myself assembly language. It was a real challenge. I was going to college for programming and, for whatever reason, I was writing everything out and nothing made any sense to me. And then I woke up one night and it was very clear how to convert X to assembler and suddenly, I was able to program the Z80.
I wrote two programs, a little graphics game called Operation Pheonix and a crude double-entry accounting package.
I found a book that was the writer’s market for computer programmers. So I reached out to Timex in Danbury, Connecticut. I got a call from Marty Warner and Timex was interested both in my programs. Things went pretty well, we talked back and forth a bit and then, I signed their software contracts and of course, “thought this is great, I’m set for life.”
I signed them in late December 1983. Marty and I would talk about once a week as they were writing things to go through production and distribution. One day in February, I called her to ask how things were coming because I had not heard anything. And she said, “Well, it’s really great timing.” They came in that morning and they shut Timex down, no one had any clue what was going on.
Timex Computers were subsidiary to Timex Corporation [the watch company]. Timex Computer ran on a letter of credit. They would go once every six months or so and see if they could get credit extended to them to fund their business for another six months, based off of their business model and their viability. That way, Timex corporate didn’t put any money into this and they would not lose anything if everything went down.
That was really helpful [for Timex corporate], especially considering the fact that Timex Computer didn’t get any money for any of the ZX81s and Spectrums that were produced in Scotland by Timex, the parent company. That money went straight to Timex. They went in February 1984 and that month, the whole industry tanked. Timex got out, TI got out.
Marty helped me negotiate with Timex to invalidate the contracts because they had never actually produced anything. They hadn’t sent anything off to manufacturing. I then sold the accounting package to Pegasus Micro Systems in Maryland. We were all cottage industries. We didn’t even have cottages: we were doing it from our living room.
The game program, I released under Pheonix Enterprises. You know, gung-ho at 19 years old, wanted to be sure that I could trademark the name, hence the O and the E being reversed the books. Everybody kept saying, “you know, you misspelled the company’s name, right?”
Marty and her husband started a company called Games To Learn By. They were like an aggregator, they didn’t really create software. But she knew all of us, those of us who have been reaching out to Timex, and more importantly, she knew the liquidators that were dealing with Timex.
About 10 or 15 other small companies, we got the liquidators to agree to include our catalogs. They just simply put them into the boxes. They literally just opened it and shoved them in-between the boxes and the styrofoam. We did quite a bit of business that way.
My friend and I kept Pheonix running for about two years. We tried a few things. Like a lot of people, we knew that you could just simply swap the ROMs on a 2068 and run Spectrum software. But most people didn’t really want to open their computer.
Timex had shown a prototype of a cartridge that you could plug in and turn it into a Spectrum. That gave us the idea to take a 28 pin ribbon cable and fold it at a right angle and it would go perfectly from the ROM socket, out to the cartridge door. You could lift up the cartridge door and you’d have your socket and you could replace the spectrum or the 2068 ROMs without having to open the computer.
Nobody had any clue that Timex Portugal was carrying on with the computers at this point. We all thought it was dead and gone. There was this guy, David Higginbottom. He had financial backers and was going to relaunch the Timex 2068 as Time Star Computers. He and I talked several times. I suspect that if he had known about Portugal, he might have been able to do that.
What did us in, and probably a lot of other people too, were the people who made promises to develop new hardware here in the United States. One of them promised us something they called a stringy floppy, which was basically like a microdrive except instead of using their microdrives, it used a mini-cassette. And they just simply couldn’t produce. We had people that had paid us for hundreds of these things.
We also worked with a gentleman from Indiana who a contract with Tasman Software to produce Tasword Two. He had do us do the manufacturing and marketing stuff. We bought all sorts equipment and we advertised it, and we got a cease and desist letter two months later. He had a legitimate contract but another American company got exclusive rights to it in the US, which effectively invalidated ours. Stuff sort of happened like all at the same time.
Things like that killed Pheonix. I went into retail and never looked back.
Check out Jim’s YouTube channel, Weird Nashville, for historical oddities, genealogy, technology, entertainment and commentary.
