| ... and snags award | The British newspaper The Guardian has named Clive Sinclair as the Young Businessman of the Year. The award is made annually to people in Britain who have shown particular ability in business. Past winners have included Sir Michael Edwards, the man responsible for improving the ailing fortunes of Britain’s state-owned carmaker BL. | |
| 16 Pin Bowling | SIXTEEN PINS appear at the top of the screen for Bowling and the ball at the bottom. Use keys 5 and 8 to line up the two and press key 0 to bowl. The ball will be deflected by impact with the pins and thus make your task more difficult. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Type-in program |
| 2K games will please | Description: Starblaster is one of six 2K games on a tape sold by Softsync Inc. The game uses machine language to scroll stars right to left across the screen. The player scores points by moving a base in front of the stars. Evaluation: The major problem with Starblaster is the instructions. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| A-maze-ing 3-D overview | Description: Labyrinth is a game sold by Mindware that creates a maze which the player must go through. At the start of the game, the player must choose the width and height of the maze. Before entering the maze, the player is given the option of seeing it first. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Alien Lure | A GAME which links the bug-baiting type of program with a battle against alien invaders has been produced by Sanath Yogasundrum. When the game begins, the player is asked for a skill level, A or P, which stand for amateur or professional. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Downloadable, Type-in program |
| Aliens Attack | In Galactic Invaders, seven alien crafts fly randomly around the screen, and fire at your laser base. The base can withstand seven hits before it is destroyed. After all seven crafts are destroyed, seven more appear and move at a higher speed. The player scores one point for each craft shot down. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| All about ROMs | In Understanding Your ZX-81 ROM, by Ian Logan, the reader doesn’t have to contend with an update from the Sinclair ZX-80. Hold your joy, however, because since the book was published Sinclair has modified their original 8K ROM monitor. | Sinclair ZX81 |
| Assembler offers aid | Description: Machine language programming is very slow and tedious without using an assembler program. International Publishing and Software sells ZX Assembler, a program that allows you to enter and edit machine language using mnemonics. ZX Assembler occupies 7K and is located at the top of memory. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Build your own EPROM blower without blowing a fortune | BECAUSE most users of the T/S1000,ZX81 are software-orientated, the hardware has been made simple in this design. The software needed to run it consequently will be large and some of it is in machine code. The heart of the design is the 8255 programmable peripheral interface device. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Bulletins: Software satirizes suburbanites | Got some information you’d like to share regarding a new product or service or idea? Organizing an event you’d like to see listed? Let us know! Write to Bulletin Board, Timex Sinclair User, 49 La Salle Avenue, Buffalo, N.Y. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Check our handy chess guide | In a stalemate over which chess program to buy? Check here before you make your move and you won’t get rooked! TO HELP you bring order to the wide array of software available for the T/S1000,ZX81, our writers will look at specific types of programs in each issue. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Clive sells 1.6 million computers... | Sinclair Research has claimed to be the first company to sell more than one million home computers. Since it began selling the ZX80 three years ago it has sold 130,000 ZX80s, 750,000 ZX81s and 200,000 Spectrums, an upgraded version of which is to appear soon in North America as the T/S2000. | |
| Computer Combat! | THE FIRST question often asked about a new machine is “Does it play Space Invaders?” Though a 1K machine has considerable difficulty getting anywhere Computer Combat using only 1K, is a type of mini Space Invaders but with only one invader and one base and a much slower rate of firing. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Downloadable, Type-in program |
| Computers as teachers: do they work? | Computers are in our schools now, and students are using them every day. Are they dehumanizing? Do they teach anything? Will teachers reject them? Charles Durang, science and computer editor for Reston Publishing, explores some old computer myths. | |
| Defend your planet | Description: You are in charge of a missile launcher and must save Earth from invading spaceships. With 15 rockets, you must choose a velocity to shoot down the invaders. The direction of each rocket is determined by the velocity you choose for it. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Fast Action In 2K | Description: In TS Destroyer, you fly in the center of the screen, and objets fly toward you from the left; you must dodge or shoot them. At the same time, another spaceship is flying up and down to your right, taking shots at you. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Fresh air from Reston | If you’ve ever had to struggle through page after page of a boring book, you’ll really appreciate this breath of fresh air: in fact, customs officials should have bestowed it a personality award. It’s fun. The writing is very readable and will please both adult and child. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Go with the flow and no illogical jumps | LAST MONTH I explained how to draw a flowchart of a program by splitting it into parts. Each part corresponds to an operation performed either by the user or the computer program. This month we take that a step further and examine a way of breaking a program code into easily-understood areas. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Type-in program |
| How educational are the "educational" programs | KIDS DO LEARN from using computer games. This does not make those games educational programs. To be educational, a program must teach something that somebody planned to teach. In the jargon of the schools, that is called a learning objective. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| In search of a golden memory | THE MOST important hardware device you can add to your computer is a memory unit. In this article we analyse three memory units for design, flexibility, durability and cost: the Memopak 16K, the Sinclair 16K RAM and the Panda 16K. These connect to the T/S1000 via the expansion port at the rear of the computer. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Knight's Move | KNIGHT’S MOVE uses the movement pattern of the knight in chess to try to cover every space in a square. The program asks where you wish to start on the board, giving the vertical coordinate first, and then marks the moves as you make your way round the board. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Downloadable, Type-in program |
| Laser Cannon | A fleet of 20 "X” ships is attacking you. You must destroy at least 15 of them or be destroyed. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Type-in program |
| Letters: Lending an Ear, Keeping the Faith, Complaint Department | I purchased the Timex Sinclair to see if a 60-year-old retired gent could learn computer programming. I do have problems finding books that do more than teach one to input programs and play games. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| More Missile Madness | Description: A missile launcher moves up and down on the left side of the screen in the program called Missile Launcher. You fire missiles at ammunition dumps on the right side of the screen. The player gets 25 shots and scores points for hitting the ammunition. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| No Faire for Timex | Fifty thousand people agreed that the 8th West Coast Computer Faire, held in San Francisco from March 18 to March 20, was fantastic. It boasted 500 different exhibitors ranging from the small single-booth entrepreneur selling tapes and books to the “big guns” like Apple, Commodore and I.B.M. | |
| Shoot Your Way To Safety | Description: Combat Flight casts you as the commander of a fighter ship, flying through mountainous terrain shooting at alien ships. Seven types of alien ships fly by. Points scored depend on the type of alien you hit with your lasers. A player gets three lives per game. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Surround | YOU WILL probably recognize Surround as soon as you RUN it. It is a version of a fairly standard routine in which you are required to surround your adversary before he can surround you. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Downloadable, Type-in program |
| The basic route to a habit-forming hobby | BUYING a Timex Sinclair machine can be the start of a lifetime obsession with home computing. It is easy, however, to become discouraged if everything does not go according to plan from the beginning. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| The Great Connecticut Kit-Building Experiment | New Haven's Chris Baldwin ignited young minds by introducing 28 students to the world of tech through his 10-week ZX81 workshop. | Sinclair ZX81 |
| The Paradoxical World of Clive Sinclair | Now 42, and with his company, Sinclair Research, recently valued at over 200 million dollars, Clive Sinclair can reflect on a 20-year career in electronics which has established him as Britain’s leading high-technology entrepreneur. | |
| These kids' books make learning fun | There are many books on the market today aimed at teaching kids how to get the most from their home computers. Two of these are Computers for Kids, by Sally Greenwood Larsen, and Katie and the Computer, by Fred D’Ignazio. Both are from Creative Computing Press and both should delight young computer users everywhere. | |
| Timex needs higher profile | Welcome to our second issue. Your response to our first was overwhelming and really gratifying. From all of us on this side of Timex Sinclair User to all of you, “Thanks”. Our contest editor is screaming for more help to deal with all the great games that are pouring in. | |
| U.K. Hoax Exposed | Last April, the British counterpart to this magazine, Sinclair User, ran a program entitled “Machine Code Converter” that was amazingly economical — only 27 lines long. “Now a brilliant piece of programming enables the Basic programmer to convert his listing automatically into machine code by LOADing from a tape or by entering the program line by line from the keyboard,” claimed the instructions alongside the program. | |
| Use It | ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Keith Goode of Arlington, Texas, certainly gives you your money’s worth with this program. In the menu, Use It presents you with, you can choose one of seven options. The first turns your computer into a drawing board. Option two draws sine wave curves. | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Type-in program |
| Vast database soon available to Sinclair users | WITH THE next new computer from Sinclair Research not expected until next year, attention in the U.K. is being focussed on expanding existing systems. The two major expansions for which Sinclair owners are eagerly waiting are the Microdrives and Micronet 800. Both have been announced but neither is yet available. | Sinclair ZX Spectrum |
| Vast support network growing | A VAST support network exists for the T/S1000,ZX81: wherever goes the most popular computer in history, user groups are not far behind. Below is a list of many such groups in the United States; as new ones are springing up all the time, we make no claims that it is inclusive. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| When the lights go out ... | The Cramic-81 is a low-power, battery-backup RAM. It uses up-to-date technology such as lithium batteries to maintain your RAM’s contents even when the power is disconnected. It is ideal for keeping large, often used programs, machine code routines or programs you are working on without the bother of having to load them from cassette each time. | Timex/Sinclair 1000 |
| Who says that graphics have to be complicated? | Can you tell us some of the computers that you use for computer graphics? These include some very large IBM machines like 370s, 3033s and 3081s, some personal computers like the Apple, and the Timex Sinclair 1000 home computer. Does it make sense to use a T/S1000,ZX81 when you can use these larger machines? | Timex/Sinclair 1000, Type-in program |
