Grimm was software manager for Timex Computer Corporation, from January 1980 to March 1982.
He was one of the original six at Timex Computer Corporation, along with Billy Skyrme, Bob Behler, Carlos Dragovich, Margot Murphy, and Dan Ross.
How He Got the Job
Grimm joined Timex in 1970 as a COBOL programmer, with later work in FORTRAN, PL/1, and Nomad. By the early 1980s he was the lone IT person on the third floor of corporate headquarters in Connecticut. He had no microcomputer experience.
“Fred Olsen, of course he owned Timex. He was very down to earth. He walked right in there and dropped in front of me this black box back from ZX81. He said, ‘You think you could make this work before I leave?’ My boss raced in behind me — ‘They are going to get me fired.’ That’s how I got in. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Within weeks Grimm had a small BASIC program running. Olsen returned with new instructions: Timex would market the machine in the United States.
Billy Skyrme: The Director Who Made It Happen
Grimm credits his boss, Billy Skyrme (Director of IT), with making TCC’s North American launch possible. “He alone made that machine in North America happen from a technical point of view. He did everything but the marketing. He could get [Chuck], Sue Currier, everybody on board that he needed.”
CES Chicago and Tavern on the Green
The first public launches were CES Chicago and a press event at Tavern on the Green in New York City. The launch software consisted of two BASIC programs Grimm wrote himself: Budgeteer (a home budget program) and States and Capitals. Reportedly 600,000 orders came out of CES.
Grimm set up the machines and stayed in the background. Dan Ross handled the sales pitches. “My role really was — I was all about the program.”
SoftSync Arrives
A turning point came when Sue Currier of SoftSync drove into the parking lot in a Mercedes, wearing a long mink coat. “She said, ‘Hi, I’m Sue Currier from SoftSync. I hear you’re marketing the ZX Spectrum here under your own branding. I’ve got the software.’ SoftSync to the rescue. We formed a lifelong friendship.” Currier already had connections to Nigel Searle and a pipeline of debugged, packaged titles ready to be rebadged.
Open Door for Submissions
Beyond SoftSync, Grimm operated an open-door policy at Timex headquarters. “You could come to our headquarters and sit in our lobby. I would come down and look at your cassette tape. No appointment needed.” Authors received a 7% royalty. He met Mitch Kapor, the future author of Lotus 1-2-3 (still unknown at the time) and Bill Gates, who came to discuss porting Microsoft BASIC to a 16K version .
The team grew to include two assistants, a cataloger named Rod (later poached by Sue Currier), Bob Behler — who taught Grimm Z80 assembly — and a small group of testers Grimm hired more for their game-playing skills than coding ability. His standout favorites among submitting authors were Sandy White (Ant Attack), and the author of the bike-and-trees game later renamed Death Chase 2000.
Popular Science Cover
When Popular Science asked for a TS1000 to photograph for a cover, neither Skyrme nor Ross wanted to drive into Manhattan. Grimm went. Editor Bill Hawkins kept him there to set the machine up, answer questions for the article team, and wait while a runner was sent out to find a yellow television to match the cover layout. “I got my name all over that — 15 minutes of fame.”
Grimm’s Fairy Trails
The names in the maze game (Grimm’s Fairy Trails) came from the founding TCC team. Murph and Drago — the Pac-Man-style chasers — were Margot Murphy and Carlos Dragovich, fused. Prince Billy was Billy Skyrme, who insisted the game keep that name. The power pills were “Behlers.” Grimm wrote the BASIC at home over a month in 1982; Bob Behler taught him enough Z80 to write the movement routine, which he POKE’d into a REM statement byte by byte.
Cook Labs and Cassette Duplication
Grimm describes a memorable visit to Cook Labs, the duplication house Timex used. Expecting a wall of cassette decks, he found one machine: a 12-foot reel of magnetic tape with the master program recorded onto it 500 times in sequence, fed through a stacker that injected, cut, spliced, and labeled each cassette automatically. Cook Labs duplicated every cassette TCC ever shipped.
The TS 2068 and the ROM Problem
The push to “Americanize” the Spectrum — joysticks, cartridge port, real keyboard — required rewriting the ROM. TCC contracted a foundry in Arizona for the mask ROM. “First trip — we’ll be ready in a month. They came back from Arizona, ran their tests, failed. Wait a month before they could get another appointment. Failed. They couldn’t get the ROM right for so long. We had no income. We had the cartridges, we had stuff made. We weren’t selling anything.” TCC had ramped up to over 100 people across QC, software review, and ROM rewriting by this point.
The Fire
Grimm’s lab shared a building with the Indiglo manufacturing area (TCC having moved into the former gyro division’s space, which Timex had sold to Bendix). One night, an Indiglo curing oven was left running. The metal wall melted, reflected heat into Grimm’s office, and burned through everything. “My desk, the little steel gray ones, were that high. Melted. Nothing was left.” Every cassette in the software library was destroyed.
The fire had one perverse benefit: when authors called asking about their tape submissions, Grimm could honestly say there had been a fire.
The End and What Came After
After TCC’s final shutdown — Grimm describes Skyrme telling him on a Friday that the deal with the last potential investor had fallen through, and that all 107 employees would leave that day except him. Grimm continued at Timex on other systems. “I had a great time. Three years of pure excitement. You don’t get that much on a job working for a corporation.”
After Timex Computer Corporation
When Timex Computer Corporation shut down, Grimm stayed because he could write code that delved into deep algorithms for complex systems. He left Timex in 2000, after 30 years at the company.