Timex Sinclair

~ the eulogy ~

Timex was already building the machines before it was selling them. The Dundee factory in Scotland made ZX81s under contract for Sinclair Research, so when the American parent company decided it wanted a piece of the home computer boom, the product was sitting on its own production line. The T/S 1000 that shipped in july 1982 was that same computer with a tuner for American televisions, twice the memory at a full two kilobytes, and a price of ninety nine dollars and ninety five cents.

The number was the entire product. Nothing else in a store cost under a hundred dollars and called itself a computer, and Timex could put it somewhere Commodore could not, which was on the shelf at the pharmacy next to the wristwatches. Five hundred and fifty thousand units moved by the end of 1982 and the company was claiming six hundred thousand by early the following year. For a few months Timex was selling more computers by unit count than almost anyone in America.

Then people took them home. The keyboard was a flat membrane with no travel, so typing was a matter of pressing a picture of a key and hoping, and two kilobytes ran out the moment you tried anything, which meant buying the 16K expansion pack that plugged into the back and lost contact whenever the table moved. Programs loaded from cassette tape at a speed that made a failed load a real loss of an afternoon. A great many of them ended up in a closet within a month of being unwrapped.

This is calendar distance rather than geography. Sinclair machines did reach Turkey, but as Spectrums and as clones of Spectrums, in years when I was learning to walk. The American branch of the story was already finished before I could read. I know the shape of that keyboard the way anyone does now, from photographs, and every one of them makes it obvious why so many of these were bought once and used twice.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The joint venture was formalized in december 1982 out of Waterbury, Connecticut, with Timex supplying manufacturing and retail reach and Sinclair supplying the designs. On paper it was a good trade. Clive Sinclair had a machine that was famously cheap to build and no serious distribution in North America, and Timex had thousands of stores and a factory with nothing much to do.

What neither of them had was any idea how a computer gets sold. A watch does not need software, and a hundred dollar computer with almost no memory could not attract publishers to write any. Timex tried to fill the gap itself, which meant the buyer's choice was a small catalog of cassettes from a company with no reputation for making them, up against the shelves of Commodore and Atari titles two aisles over.

~ the unraveling ~

The 1983 lineup was an attempt to answer the complaints and it arrived too late for all of them. The T/S 1500 at seventy nine dollars added memory and a slightly better keyboard while keeping the black and white display. The T/S 2068 at a hundred and ninety nine dollars was the good machine, based on the ZX Spectrum, with color and rubber keys you could actually feel. Timex had modified it enough that most existing Spectrum software would not run, which removed the only advantage it had over the competition.

Meanwhile the price of a T/S 1000 was cut to forty nine ninety five, which is what a company does when it is trying to clear a warehouse. Commodore had spent 1983 driving the VIC-20 and then the 64 down into the same territory with hardware that was several classes better, and Texas Instruments took such heavy losses in the same war that it left the market too. Timex announced its withdrawal from American home computers in the first weeks of 1984. The venture had lasted about a year and a half.

~ the long tail ~

The machines did not stop being made, they just stopped being American. Timex Portugal kept the line alive and developed it further, selling the T/S 2068 as the TC 2068 and building a cut-down version called the TC 2048 that was more compatible with Spectrum software than the American model had been. It made disk interfaces for them. It built the Unipolbrit 2086 for export to Poland, where a cheap Spectrum-compatible machine had a market that lasted years longer than the one in Connecticut.

So the final act of America's first sub-hundred-dollar computer was a second life in southern and eastern Europe, in places where a hundred dollars meant something different and where nobody was two aisles away from a Commodore 64. The name Timex went back to watches, and stayed there.

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