26 Apr
2018
26 Apr
'18
9:46 a.m.
On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 17:55, Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
There was a very large Timex 1000 / ZX81 user base in
the US. I have
quite
a lot of newsletters and documents from these groups.
I even did an
exhibit
on the subject of SIGs for the Timex 1000 ZX81 at VCF
MW a few years ago.
You can see stacks of newsletters in stands flanking the machines and
tapes.
Personally, the $99 Timex 1000 was the only computer I
could have afforded
back then. Schools had Apple II's but not so many people in their homes
then, at least where I lived.
That's very cool. Thanks for sharing.
I knew the TS1000 (and TS1500?) did better in the USA than the TS2068 did,
but I didn't realise that they were that popular.
I was about 12 when they came out, and I have to confess, lacking colour or
sound or graphics, they were of little to no interest to me. It was the
later Spectrum that grabbed me.
But my uncle's ZX81 was the first computer I ever used that was owned by a
private individual. He was probably in his 60s when he got it, and he never
learned to operate it. I managed to enter a simple Lunar Lander game from
the manual, save it and get it running, which hugely impressed him -- he'd
failed repeatedly to get that far.
I suppose that was my first entry into the world of computing, in which I
still work...
--
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