Sinclair ZX80 questions

Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Mine was sold as a kit, but came assembled! They had run out of kits and giving those who had paid for a kit the pre-assembled ones. I was slightly disappointed. This was at the end of the ZX80 era right before the ZX81. I did a google search and looked on Wikipedia but some of the details there do NOT match my memory. They say there were only 50,000 ZX80's sold and this seems to be a ridiculously low number for a mass-market machine sold through many different channels. They say that the Sinclair brand was only in the UK and this does not match my experience of having bought one in the US (or the ads in 1980 Radio-Electronics). But this was 26 years ago, so my memory isn't exactly sharp either! The Wikipedia article might make sense if one assumes that it is only talking about the UK and ignoring sales in the rest of the world. My guesstimate, backed up by no FACTS at all but mostly on the machines extreme cheapness and how many were eventually stacked up on store shelves (there came to be a real glut of them after the successors hit the market and they were being sold at local drugstores for circa $50 when marked down), is that counting the US market, ZX80 sales were in the low hundreds of thousands and that kits might have been 10 or 20 percent of the total. Tim.