--- title: "Vintage Computer Festival MidWest 2026, Part 4" id: 71628 type: "post" slug: "vintage-computer-festival-midwest-2026-part-4" url: "http://localhost/blog/vintage-computer-festival-midwest-2026-part-4/" markdown_url: "http://localhost/blog/vintage-computer-festival-midwest-2026-part-4.md" published_at: "2026-09-22T23:56:26+00:00" modified_at: "2026-09-22T23:57:06+00:00" author: "David Anderson" featured_image: url: "http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0493-Large.jpeg" excerpt: "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…" category: - name: "Blog" slug: "blog" taxonomy: "category" url: "http://localhost/category/blog/" post_tag: - name: "TS 1000" slug: "ts1000" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/ts1000/" model: - name: "Timex/Sinclair 1000" slug: "ts-1000" taxonomy: "model" url: "http://localhost/model/ts-1000/" indiv: - name: "Joe Vandezande" slug: "joe-vandezande" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/joe-vandezande/" - name: "John Mobley" slug: "john-mobley" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/john-mobley/" --- # Vintage Computer Festival MidWest 2026, Part 4 *Last in a series on VCF Midwest 21. [Part one](http://localhost/timex-sinclair/vintage-computing-festival-midwest-2026/), [part two](http://localhost/blog/vintage-computer-festival-midwest-2026-part-2/), [part three](http://localhost/blog/vintage-computer-festival-midwest-2026-part-2-2/).* 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](http://localhost/indiv/joe-vandezande/) brought three such machines to Schaumburg, and each of them answers a question the ZX81 left open. ## The machine as Timex wanted you to see it Timex offered [retailers a display unit for the TS 1000](http://localhost/timex-sinclair/timex-at-k-mart/): a freestanding stand with room underneath for boxed computers, cassettes and memory packs, and a flat surface on top where the demonstration machine sat. The store supplied its own television. Joe had the [EPROM board](http://localhost/product/eprom-store-demonstrator/) inside the unit that plugged into the back of the 1000. You plug it in, you turn it on, the program runs. The program asks for your name, talks at you for a while, puts up a brief picture of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and then offers to scale a recipe to however many people you plan to feed. It is a very silly piece of software, and the Columbia is the tell: in 1982 that was the most modern object anyone could think of, and Timex wanted a little of it on the screen next to the recipe. It was also, in 1982, standing next to a VIC-20 in a Kmart, and in that context it was doing real work: it made a black slab with a flat keyboard look like something that would be useful in your house. [John Mark Mobley](http://localhost/indiv/john-mobley/), who grew up in a home and school with about a hundred children, met it at the show and asked it for a cake for a hundred. It thought about it, and it told him how many eggs. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0494-Large-1024x768.jpeg)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0494-Large.jpeg)The genuine Timex retail demonstrator, restored by Joe VandeZande. The board that runs it is underneath, in a case Joe printed. ## The machine somebody made their own This one came out of [Bob Swoger’s](http://localhost/indiv/bob-swoger/) collection, to John Mark Mobley, to me, to Joe. Sometime in the early eighties its owner decided the case was not good enough, cut a new one out of plexiglass, and built a keyboard out of Radio Shack push-button switches. The top row uses the cheapest switch Radio Shack sold — a fine part if you intend to press it once a week, and not a keyboard switch by any reading. There are only three rows of keys, which is a problem on a machine that needs four. The solution is a three-position toggle hidden under the handle. Flip it down and the top row acts as the third row of the ZX81 keyboard; flip it up and the same row gives you the numerics. The middle position turns it off, for no reason anyone has been able to reconstruct. The best part is in the upper left corner. The builder bought a bar-graph driver chip and an LED bar from Radio Shack, wired them to the tape input, and then — this is the part that makes the whole machine — inked a small black line on the plastic at the level where tapes actually loaded for him. Six LEDs out of ten. He worked it out once and recorded it where he would see it every time. It is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Anyone who used a 1000 daily learned to read the width of the black bars on the screen and never thought about it again. But that is what people did with these computers: they found the part that annoyed them and they built something. The light still works. So does the little black reset button. Joe checked. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0493-Large-1024x768.jpeg)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0493-Large.jpeg)From Bob Swoger’s collection. The black line beside the LED bar marks the volume that worked. ## The machine Joe made his own The third is Joe’s, built a long time ago on a surplus Texas Instruments keyboard. He spray-painted the keys white — most of them — printed the legends on an early black-and-white laser printer, went over the red characters with a marker, sprayed both sides of the paper with clear matte lacquer, cut out each key and glued it down. That is a description of a bodge, and it has worked ever since. The keys look good. John Mark has one from Bob Swoger that looks almost identical and was done in correction fluid and handwriting, by somebody neither of them can name. The bookend to it was sitting a few feet away on the same table, and I wrote about it in [part one](http://localhost/timex-sinclair/vintage-computing-festival-midwest-2026/): a keyboard Joe designed and 3D-printed, wired with wire-wrap wire into a ZX81, with a ZX-Wespi-V and a screen bolted to the outside. The keycaps on it are painted and papered exactly the way the 1980s one was. ## Repair, or restore All three of these raise the same question, and it came up at the meeting afterward without anybody quite settling it: are you repairing the machine, or restoring it? They are not the same job. Restoring means putting it back the way it left the factory. Repairing means making it work now, for a person who wants to use it. My own line sits at composite video. Adding a composite modification to a 1000 does not trouble me at all, because the television it was built to talk to no longer exists and a computer nobody can see is not preserved, it is just stored. Pulling out every RAM chip and replacing the lot with one modern static RAM is a different proposition.