Back in the 80's we convinced my friend's mom that we could hack into banks over the power line using the ZX81. We wrote a little application that simulated transferring money between accounts, etc. We gave her a real fright and she started shouting that we should immediately switch it off before the police come fetch us. Was funny to us but the poor lady nearly had a heart attack. :D
I had a Timex Sinclar 1000. I got it from Montgomery Ward Catalog. It cost me $19.95 USD for the Comp. $19.95 USD for the 16K Expansion. Also another $19.99 for the Radioshack tape drive. So For $60 I had a Real computer.I loved it. For learning it was great.
I know I'm late in responding...only just seen this, and your later videos about the ZX81 series.... In this one you, you ask "who would want to run a business with this...?" Well, back in 1981, when I was a mere 20yr old, I was working a small privately owned computer shop in Banbury, Oxfordshire (England), and we sold these ZX81 computers, along with Vic-20's, and Atari 400's, and we were also a Tandy (UK distributor for Radio Shack) items... one of our regular customers was a rather eccentric gentleman who owned and ran a small health-food shop some 3 doors down from us, and was forever buying the silver-coloured thermal printer paper for the original ZX Printer that plugged into the back of the ZX81 (and later the ZX Spectrum). He was running his shop accounts using a ZX81 (with 16K RAM expansion Pak).... some commercially available software at the time was what he used; some basic spreadsheet and database programme:- it was either called Z-Calc, or ZX-Calc...can't remember now - too many years gone past!! So yeah! I knew of one rather eccentric person who was successfully (or so he told us!!) running his business accounts with a ZX-81!! Ah... good old days! :-) Thanks for these videos.... you've brought back some really old and long forgotten memories... :-)
My father bought a Timex Sinclair from a "job lot" store in Connecticut...more as a joke. Since we bought it in 1985-86 it came with the built computer, 16K expansion pack, various input wires, and four games on tape. It even had a few manuals.
RIP Sir Clive Sinclair who passed away this week (17th September 2021). The ZX81 was the first home computer I had as a kid, but the downside was having to share the main TV with my folks who didn't like me using the TV too much.
A friend brought me the TIMEX version of one of these that he got as a kit. He had built it right, but we never got it to work properly, the screen would freeze up. He switched over to an Atari computer that he enjoyed, while I stayed on the Commodore line (VIC, 64 and then 128). I always wondered how one of these was supposed to work. Thanks for sharing the video. After 30 years my question has been answered!
a priest friend of mine ( deceased ) had one of these and gave it to a missionary so he could type his sermons on it . i remember these machines being advertised in electronic magazines of the time .
Great video. Growing up in the UK in the early 80's was crazy , so many micro computers were coming out. Sinclair, Dragon, BBC , Acorn ,Oric. The list goes on and then you had Commodore and Atari . Great times .👍 All the best.
Good review.. Here in the US, it had a tiny window where it made any economic sense at all, and on discount it was all I could afford, yet... its how I got my start and led to the living I make today. Me and a buddy still program assembly on it, and have been expanding our Sinclair collections lately. The Spectrum Next is driving a huge revival for other folks like me too.
Boy that Timex Sinclair computer brings back memories. I bought one in the early eighties. Not many people out there remember these. I also bought an apple 2e at that time also. and had commodores too. I also got the extra 15 k memory for the sinclair. At some point I took it apart to see how it worked and it never got put together again. Eventually I joined the marines and left all that at my parents house, and never saw it again.
I only subscribed to your channel a few weeks ago so I only just seen this video. I had a Sinclair +2 with the built in tape deck in 1988. Thanks for the upload.
It's major pro was it's very low price, and thanks to that it got many young people interested in programming (making games, etc.) However I really detest the keyboard, as it makes it very difficult when typing lots of codes. The feel and longevity of a keyboard is essential for me.
hi, do you use a smartphone with A REAL KEYBOARD today?.... yeh riight? i guess zx81 and timex 1000 have a keyboard that is a little more REAL than the keyboard today we use in other devices. don't you?
My first computer was a ZX81 to which I added as peripherals: an I/O adapter that accepted the 16K Rampak piggybacked to a 32KMemopak, for a total of 48K; also a "stringy floppy" drive which loaded very small endless tape loops of 5', 10' 25' and 50' in wafer-sized cassettes of about 1.5" wide by 1" deep by 1/8" high (the tape was about 1/16" . It ran at 56,000 baud ( where the cassette recorder interface was 250 baud ). Also a 40 column thermal printer ( on white paper rolls ) instead of the ZX printer (which I also had, but because it burned the print output on aluminized paper it was expensive to run). With this system I learned "Sinclair Basic" and wrote a few simple programs, and purchased many pre-recorde programs on cassette at the time. I still have it in storage.
Ah, my first computer (1982). It had a decent Basic but very little great software or games. The ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum were manufactured by Timex for Sinclair at their factory in Dundee, Scotland.
The ZX80 was my very first computer gifted to me by my uncle. It was quite an experience typing in BASIC code from a handbook without knowing how it worked. I just wanted to run programs. Shame I don't know what happened to it afterwards.
Dekks Herton And the Atari 400 used it in 1979, and the Odyssey 2 had one similar around the same time. For Sinclair it was all about low cost and low complexity. It probably made it look less daunting than a 'real' computer keyboard, too, which didn't hurt its visual appeal.
Jonathan B Even the people who worked for the American division of Sinclair called it "Zee X"! Insisting that it must be pronounced "Zed X" even in the USA is simply revisionist history created by individuals too young to remember when the ZX81 was new.
+Jonathan B "I don't even know why the British call it Zed" Americans are in the minority here... www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/why-do-the-british-pronounce-z-as-zed/ Even the Dutch are at it... (click speaker icon) www.heardutchhere.net/DutchPronunciation.html
+lum otaku The letter "Z" was always pronounced 'zed' since the inception of the english language. Out of all english speaking countries only the US changed the pronunciation to 'zee' for some unknown reason. Even in Canada it's pronounced 'zed'.
I did actually use mine as a door stop. But I wish I had kept it. So nostalgic. I can remember the shop I purchased it from and how much it cost. WHSmith in Canterbury Kent Uk, Price was £99 more expensive than US but still cheaper than anything else in UK at time. At the time there was nothing else to be honest. Believe it or not you could get very fast at typing the programs in after a while. Peek and Poke were the best as you could write machine code with this little beast very easily using those two key commands.
I can remember that Sinclair ZX81. But my first "real" computer was Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Beutiful mashine with color graphix and sound..... I have in my foggy memory, that Sinclari first makes the S80 model before ZX81 (?). Regards from Dalsbruk, Finland.
I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 back in the 90s. It suffered the same fate with the keyboard though and in my case the cable was broken to far to be salvageable. Also all of the screw posts broke off during disassembly. It ended up getting trashed.
No. The Acorn Electron was never sold here. The BBC Micro was available in the USA, but very few were sold, and most of the U.S. models were shipped back to the UK, converted to European power and video standards, and used in schools there. I believe the Archimedes series was available in Canada, but I've never heard of it being sold in the USA.
I have one of those at home and it was labeled as Timex/Sinclair brand computer and it was my first computer and it came with 3k of ram and the 16k ram expansion adapter and I had it too. I used it until the power cable broke on the inside of the computer.
Great review!. Replacement newly fabricated keyboard membranes can be bought on-line - I replaced the original one on my ZX-81 with one of the new membranes, now the keyboard will outlast the rest of the computer :-)
my parents had the sinclair 1000 which cost the same price but never had any acessories for it. they used a cassette deck that had mic jacks on it to be able to use tapes on it. i never played with it sadly but i wish i could get another one sometime.
I love how old tech in some ways can be so much better than new (your tv working with pal). I never knew that you could get a pal signal to display on a ntsc tv. I suppose it helps that the pal signal is black and white to begin with. I learned something new today, Thanks. Now I'm off to watch your MC-10 video ;)
The ZX Spectrum does have colour, only 8 true colours but there is a light/dark option so 16, the RAM (in the traditional rubber keyed versions) went up to 48K, they're great machines, I have 3, they have a much faster CPU than the commodore 64! Oh you can get replacement membranes, the new ones are UV proof so won't go brittle
15 colours, since bright black is still black. ;) but you also had flash, which swapped the ink and paper (foreground and background) a few times a second.
I like LGR, but he was wrong. Letters, words, and product names are pronounced differently in different countries. For example, in the USA, Hyundai is pronounced "hun-day", while in the UK, it's pronounced "hyoon-deye". In this case, Sinclair Research's U.S. division would clearly be using the U.S. pronounciation for their product names!
Although this cheap, "farty" little British computer with its annoying keyboard was never popular in the US, it at least got some American computer manufacturers to significantly drop their prices in order to compete with it, thus allowing many more ordinary Americans to purchase home computers during the 1980s.
A lot of the modern LCD TV's support PAL standard, even ones sold in the USA, my 2007 Insignia and my 2010 Sony LCD's handle PAL RF video just fine, they switch automatically when it detects a PAL or NTSC signal.
Back in the 80s i had a sinclair zx81, it was my first computer, comes with a b/w tv from my dad. finally the computer was garbage.. often had problems to type in commands, some keys stopped working. i remember if the ram was almost empty, the sinclair was getting slower slower.. anyway nice to see it
That was my first computer in year 82 or 83. After that I did get Spectrum+ and its power did wreck so I did make power to it from zx-81 power. I have both in my storage :)
Anonymous Binarytrader You can get brand new replacements these days for £10, with the power supply. Sinclair sold the ZX80/81 with a 9V DC PowerSuppy. +9V is the tip of the 3.5mm mono jack 700mA for the use without Sinclair-printer 1200mA for the use with Sinclair-printer 450mA is the power comsumption of an unexpanded ZX81. You can use the same psu for ZX80/ZX81. A Spectrum psu will not work, only because it has an other type of plug.
Our junior high school got a ZX1000 or ZX81 in 1980. We also had a TRS-80 Model I. The Sinclair computer did have a printer attached. It was a narrow thermal type on grey coloured paper, like one of the TRS-80 mobile printers of the day. Pretty useless. I guess those machines were fine for learning BASIC, but that's about it.
The earlier ZX80 used no custom parts and could be upgraded to ZX81 spec. As a result, you can build your own ZX80/81 using standard off-the-shelf parts.
I imagine that the ZX81 would be quite rear over there. It was released to late to have an impact, if you had had it released a year before and the Specky in 82, it could have been quite different.
An American version of the ZX Spectrum was available by mail order from Sinclair Research for $299, but I've never seen one. Timex initially planned to sell the Spectrum as the Timex-Sinclair 2000, but they decided it wasn't good enough to compete in the U.S. market, so they gave it a better keyboard, better graphics, better sound, built-in joystick ports, and a built-in cartridge slot, and called it the Timex-Sinclair 2068 -- which ended up being a major failure because it was released too late, and even with the upgrades it couldn't compete with the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL.
I remember Crazy Eddie selling the Timex Sinclair next to the C=64, so that people could use it to get a rebate offered by Commodore. I think the Timex cost ten bucks and the rebate was a hundred... but it was thirty years ago and hard for me to remember precisely. Anyone else remember?
I've heard of the Timex selling for as low as $20 by 1983... but knowing Crazy Eddie's shady business practices, they probably did sell it for even less than that! And people did the same thing with software... they'd buy an old version of a program at a closeout sale price, just to use it to get the "competitive ugprade" discount on the new program they did want.
as for sound, add ons by 3rd parties were available, or even self build versions, using mainly the AY-3-8912 chip (giving it much better sound capabilities than the spectrum 😉) a 'semi clone' of the zx81, the lambda 8300/power 3000/'your computer' had an optional colour module, which i've read 'in theory' could be made to work with a zx81 but very awkward, you need to composite mod the zx81, and theres no default initialisation or commands to drive it within the zx81 rom, obviously,.... the lambda rom cannot be drop in fitted into a zx81 to make it work due to a few differences in lambda hardware, but i think 'may'/should be possible as an external rom, limiting it patching out the internal rom to below address 7680, (zx81 stores the font bitmap in its rom 7680 to 8191, lambda has it stored in an rom internal to its ula, using those addresses for the extra stuff) but then the keyboard functions/punctuation arrangement is different, so it would need an altered version of the rom to suit!! probably too much hassle overall 😁 the lambda also has limited sound capability, but i havent as yet seen any info how its done, presumably as no separate sound chip, single bit IO port....
I've always wondered what happens when you plug the power supply into a regular headphone jack, since the TS1000 power supply uses the same connector as an audio jack.
The other classic British home computer, the Amstrad CPC, was it ever sold in the United States ? According to wiki only the CPC 6128 saw the light of day in America. So i assume that to Americans it must be a pretty obscure computer
oh cool this one time at my high school i was asked with a bunch of other people in my computer class to clean out some old stuff in the basemen and we found like 150 of those things and screens for them two they all when to the recycling except for a few one went into a display cabinet at the school and two or three went home with a computer geek friend of mine
Nice demo, but I wasn't impressed with the Sinclair back then. I remember checking out Timex Sinclair 1000 that was on display with a monitor at a department store around 1982-3. And compared to a Commodore Vic-20, C=64 and other American computers of the time, I thought the Sinclair felt too cheap and toy-like with the membaine keyboard. And the graphics and sound didn't impress me. I've since checked out Sinclair game demos and it looks like a fun computer despite it's limitations.
I had a C64, a ZX81 and still have the Spectrum. In my opinion there are no such things as "toy" or "business" or whatever computers. A computer is what you make of it. I've seen these three "limited" computers do amazing things for their time and hardware. How I miss those days...
+Daniel T. So true, those early computers did a lot of work for how limited they were. Now we have computers with thousands more processing power doing less work. I wasn't trying to call the Sinclair a toy. It just felt like one compared to the C-64 which had a real keyboard and peripherals like disk drives, modems, printers, monitors etc with better USA sales and support in the 80's.
***** Greetings from Portugal to Texas I assume! You're absolutely right and I blame that on Sir Clive Sinclair for having such a wonderful machine and also for being so poor exporting it to the rest of the world. Unlike the the ZX 81 the ZX Spectrum (the C64 competitor) had lots of peripherals and software but didn't really go much further than UK, Europe and one or other country like Brasil. Had it made to US and/or Japan it might had been more popular than the C64, wich was what happened in Europe (in general) mostly because of its low-cost.
TheTurnipKing You're right. I remember reading something from the mid-80's about that. It was something like "Clive Sinclair always wanted his company to be manageable" wich meant that Sinclair Research never grew when it could. His line of products suffered greatly from that: components supply and assembly, overall build quality and demand. I've read this book and it refers to this point as well as all the other mistakes Clive Sinclair did: ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/books/SinclairStoryThe.pdf
Well you're American, so you can call it "zee" if you want to :-) Not a bad little computer... this seems like something you'd buy if you were interested in computers, but not sure if you're ready for a big system. Also, cool little trick, connecting a PAL unit to a NTSC TV. If I ever come across a PAL computer, VCR, etc, I'll know what to do, because I have an appropriate TV. Nice CD too. I wonder who introduced you to his music ;-)
The raster bars are caused by the TV, not the computer. The computer's video signal goes out of sync when it's loading or saving data on cassette, thus causing the TV to display a distorted image.
But is this not the start of the raster bars usage on other machines? I thought this bug instead of being fixed and eliminated was then retained & used to give useful information on the status of the loading process in the border of the screen on other machines.
You're probably right about it being the inspiration, but on other machines the "raster bars" are a deliberate effect produced by the program changing the colors of the border area, rather than an unintentional effect caused by an out-of-tune TV.
My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000, it was hard to learn but it did teach you how to program. It also was the best looking computer on the market. :-) In England the Spectrum is so popular today that a Kickstarter project designed and built a next generation ZX Spectrum called ZX Spectrum Next. This project raised over $1.7M in the first release and is already over another $1.5M in it’s second release. Funny there wasn’t the same community support for a next generation Commodore C64, why is that if that was the better computer?
I've gotten used to the ZX Spectrum keyboard, and I find having to only press one key for what you want better, and less time consuming, mind you it takes time to get used to it.
Did the VIC-20, or any other computer than a ZX, for that matter, warn you if you tried to input a program line or command with a syntax error in it? The ZX'es did just that, ensureing that at least the program was syntactically correct.
ö. . , I suspect that very much depends on where you live. The C64 wasn't the equivalent of $99 in the UK until the end of its life. By which time several versions of the Sinclair Spectrum had been released. The ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum were designed to be cheap, so anybody could get one. Most other contemporary computers were much more expensive. The Vic 20 was pretty much end of life by then, but still more than the Sinclair.
there is nothing new really in computer input tool that was wad around 35 years ago chiplet keyboards to save and money, touch membrain keyboards for touch secitive controls, only a lot of refinment like chiplet keay on most laptops theses days and plastic or class touch screen. on modern microwaves sill uss soft membrain touch keypad which feel like to press the pad controls pushing finger totally right though the control panel
so strange to see a UK home computer in the USA, i thought that the USA back in the days shunde stuff from the UK. if your intrestered i have "bits" of ZX48 the more commonly known sinclair, i've no use for them i just simple save them from the rubbish
a friend of mine ran a travel business with that . he had all that and a okidata printer . he kater gave it to a misinary who wrote his sermons on it as did my friend . my rriend was a ordained priest in the episcopal church. ( now deceaced ) eggscllent video
That has to be one of the cheapest computers I have ever even heard about. Not even a power switch! Were it any cheaper there would be no display of any kind.
Never heard anyone call on eof those a ZEE x81. You've obviously been told several thousand times it's not called that! Funny stuff. Nice bit of kit though. Like your vids
Correct. British home computer manufacturers simply imported the parts. I noted that a company named Ferranti made copies of American 74 series logic chips, but made sure to switch the pinouts. This made things awkward, when trying to repair legacy equipment. Ferranti had folded years earlier, so I had to make small botch boards to reassign the pinouts for the replacement chips.
all zx81s (and zx80s) are adaptable for 50 or 60 hz frame rate, add a resistor to a uk 50hz model to turn it to 'ntsc' standard 60hz,, and remove resistor on a us one for 50hz! unfortunately with the faster scan, and interrupt rate, it 'computes' slower!
and i think similar for a us ts1500, to convert to 50hz , fitting a 16k rampack on those gives you 32k, the internal 16k is shifted up the memory map, and the add on pack takes its space over, unfortunately you cant use the higher ram easily and cannot run machine code in there, without mods, or have your basic program/variables encroach into it, with display file straddling the address 32768 as this will cause problems
I dont want to be some kind of ass... but, it's a b/w signal only, so the difference is not really _between NTSC and PAL_, rather between the 525 lines/60Hz standard in the USA and the 625 lines/50Hz standard in Europe.
+Sven Ekeberg The term "NTSC" applies to both B&W and color signals using the 525/60 standard; and for the sake of brevity, I referred to the 625/50 standard as "PAL", since that's a term more people are familiar with.
Herr Friberger I'm not a PAL expert but the term NTSC goes back to 1941 and thus predates color. NTSC, as a standard covered the entirety of a broadcast television signal not just the color portion. Black and white 4:3 video with monaural sound can be NTSC, as could a color 16:9 video with stereo audio.
Actually it was the British who deliberately changed their language in the past few hundred years (look up "Received Pronunciation"). Americans today pronounce words closer to the way the British did in the 1700s and earlier: www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
Hearing you say ZEE X does sound a bit wrong, probably because I always thought it was sold in the USA as the Timex Sinclair 1000. And isn't the ZX81 still a good looking machine, regardless of what you have to say about its (lack of) capabilities? Seriously, somebody get the moulds for the ZX81, the maker community would be all over this sticking every model of devboard they could lay their hands on! Didn't Timex release a version of the ZX Spectrum? So in the UK, computers came with entire BASIC courses, in the US you get a slim pamphlet. Either they didn't expect Americans to do anything with the unit, or they expected Americans to pay for the material we Brits got in the manual with the computer. Which is odd, as I remember getting the TRS-80 Color Computer as a kid (in the UK where we were could have got even the Dragon 32 or 64 which was a better version of the CoCo) and the manual was a gigantic tome with a full course in BASIC... as was the manual for the Commodore 64C that I got in 1989. Even the Amiga 1200 that I got in 1992, while it didn't have any dialect of BASIC (or indeed any programming language) it had a technical reference which carried pinouts of all the ports on it. Now you get a slip of A3 with two paragraphs in 72 languages (something Brexit won't change) and a diagram. Also, newer American TVs can't adapt to 625 line PAL? I have a CRT TV from the 1990s that can deal with PAL (obviously) and NTSC without rolling and in full colour (assuming the Raspberry Pi outputs proper NTSC by default over its composite jack) Why is it European TVs with SCART sockets can accept NTSC but an American TV can't even accept PAL (let alone SECAM)? Not that I expect a European TV to decode ATSC digital TV. Isn't the Micro Color Computer a size reduced Color Computer?
Timex showed a US version of the ZX Spectrum at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1983, called the Timex-Sinclair 2000. But people didn't like its rubber keyboard and its sound and graphics weren't as good as the competition, so Timex totally redesigned it with a better keyboard, more RAM, better graphics and sound, built-in cartridge and joystick ports, etc. and introduced it in 1984 as the Timex-Sinclair 2068. But it came out too late and was too expensive, and all those changes made it incompatible with most Spectrum software, so it didn't sell well and Timex cancelled it and got out of the computer business only a few months later.
Back in the 80's we convinced my friend's mom that we could hack into banks over the power line using the ZX81. We wrote a little application that simulated transferring money between accounts, etc. We gave her a real fright and she started shouting that we should immediately switch it off before the police come fetch us. Was funny to us but the poor lady nearly had a heart attack. :D
Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?
in 2008 someone did the same but with our economy lol
lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!! lol!!
That is downright cruel. Nice.
I had a Timex Sinclar 1000. I got it from Montgomery Ward Catalog. It cost me $19.95 USD for the Comp. $19.95 USD for the 16K Expansion. Also another $19.99 for the Radioshack tape drive. So For $60 I had a Real computer.I loved it. For learning it was great.
I know I'm late in responding...only just seen this, and your later videos about the ZX81 series.... In this one you, you ask "who would want to run a business with this...?" Well, back in 1981, when I was a mere 20yr old, I was working a small privately owned computer shop in Banbury, Oxfordshire (England), and we sold these ZX81 computers, along with Vic-20's, and Atari 400's, and we were also a Tandy (UK distributor for Radio Shack) items... one of our regular customers was a rather eccentric gentleman who owned and ran a small health-food shop some 3 doors down from us, and was forever buying the silver-coloured thermal printer paper for the original ZX Printer that plugged into the back of the ZX81 (and later the ZX Spectrum). He was running his shop accounts using a ZX81 (with 16K RAM expansion Pak).... some commercially available software at the time was what he used; some basic spreadsheet and database programme:- it was either called Z-Calc, or ZX-Calc...can't remember now - too many years gone past!! So yeah! I knew of one rather eccentric person who was successfully (or so he told us!!) running his business accounts with a ZX-81!! Ah... good old days! :-)
Thanks for these videos.... you've brought back some really old and long forgotten memories... :-)
To be fair an 8bit computer with 16K of RAM would have been more computing power than such a business would have had just a handful years before 1981!
I miss tandy shops, the free batteries, cool books and stock - best of all the managers all seemed to be just the best humans around
have that same one it was my first computer 💻 got for my 14th birthday 🎂 back in 1984 still have it today😀
Learned basic on it 😉
My father bought a Timex Sinclair from a "job lot" store in Connecticut...more as a joke. Since we bought it in 1985-86 it came with the built computer, 16K expansion pack, various input wires, and four games on tape. It even had a few manuals.
RIP Sir Clive Sinclair who passed away this week (17th September 2021). The ZX81 was the first home computer I had as a kid, but the downside was having to share the main TV with my folks who didn't like me using the TV too much.
A friend brought me the TIMEX version of one of these that he got as a kit. He had built it right, but we never got it to work properly, the screen would freeze up. He switched over to an Atari computer that he enjoyed, while I stayed on the Commodore line (VIC, 64 and then 128). I always wondered how one of these was supposed to work. Thanks for sharing the video. After 30 years my question has been answered!
yes but with the 16k ram expansion it was a beast
a priest friend of mine ( deceased ) had one of these and gave it to a missionary so he could type his sermons on it . i remember these machines being advertised in electronic magazines of the time .
Great video. Growing up in the UK in the early 80's was crazy , so many micro computers were coming out. Sinclair, Dragon, BBC , Acorn ,Oric. The list goes on and then you had Commodore and Atari . Great times .👍 All the best.
yep, and almost all incompatible with each other....then microsoft(who else!) came up with the MSX system to try to standardise it all 😁
Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony in the background fits perfectly with the early British personal computer pioneering theme here
Good review.. Here in the US, it had a tiny window where it made any economic sense at all, and on discount it was all I could afford, yet... its how I got my start and led to the living I make today. Me and a buddy still program assembly on it, and have been expanding our Sinclair collections lately. The Spectrum Next is driving a huge revival for other folks like me too.
It was my first computer and had to wait till Christmas before I got my ram pack. Half a year on one K. Still I love it. 🙂
Boy that Timex Sinclair computer brings back memories. I bought one in the early eighties. Not many people out there remember these. I also bought an apple 2e at that time also. and had commodores too. I also got the extra 15 k memory for the sinclair. At some point I took it apart to see how it worked and it never got put together again. Eventually I joined the marines and left all that at my parents house, and never saw it again.
My first computer. So awesome. Thanks so much for the awesome video.
I only subscribed to your channel a few weeks ago so I only just seen this video. I had a Sinclair +2 with the built in tape deck in 1988. Thanks for the upload.
That was fun to see, sure brought back memories, I remember well seeing the adds for these when they first come out. I waited a while and got a coco.
I never knew about the 'hun-day' pronunciation of Hyundai. You learn something new every day!
It's major pro was it's very low price, and thanks to that it got many young people interested in programming (making games, etc.)
However I really detest the keyboard, as it makes it very difficult when typing lots of codes. The feel and longevity of a keyboard is essential for me.
hi, do you use a smartphone with A REAL KEYBOARD today?.... yeh riight? i guess zx81 and timex 1000 have a keyboard that is a little more REAL than the keyboard today we use in other devices. don't you?
@@luisdardis5223 I do have a folding compact Bluetooth keyboard for my Samsung phone but it's been years since I last used it (got it for games)
@@dronespace just trolling a little, glad for you my friend!!
@@luisdardis5223 oh lol
@@dronespace : )
My first computer was a ZX81 to which I added as peripherals: an I/O adapter that accepted the 16K Rampak piggybacked to a 32KMemopak, for a total of 48K; also a "stringy floppy" drive which loaded very small endless tape loops of 5', 10' 25' and 50' in wafer-sized cassettes of about 1.5" wide by 1" deep by 1/8" high (the tape was about 1/16" . It ran at 56,000 baud ( where the cassette recorder interface was 250 baud ). Also a 40 column thermal printer ( on white paper rolls ) instead of the ZX printer (which I also had, but because it burned the print output on aluminized paper it was expensive to run). With this system I learned "Sinclair Basic" and wrote a few simple programs, and purchased many pre-recorde programs on cassette at the time. I still have it in storage.
Ah, my first computer (1982). It had a decent Basic but very little great software or games. The ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum were manufactured by Timex for Sinclair at their factory in Dundee, Scotland.
believe it or not, there are replacement keyboard membranes available for these now 😊
The ZX80 was my very first computer gifted to me by my uncle. It was quite an experience typing in BASIC code from a handbook without knowing how it worked. I just wanted to run programs. Shame I don't know what happened to it afterwards.
I had one when I was 17 got the kit because it was cheaper it was great fun to play with. 1K space invaders was the bench mark
i couldn't imagine using a computer with a flat membrane keyboard like that. would make me feel like i'm using a microwave rather than a computer!
Dont knock it, thats all we had that was cheap compared to the expensive US and Japanese machines at the time.
Dekks Herton And the Atari 400 used it in 1979, and the Odyssey 2 had one similar around the same time. For Sinclair it was all about low cost and low complexity. It probably made it look less daunting than a 'real' computer keyboard, too, which didn't hurt its visual appeal.
You could get a keyboard overlay for it, was a heck of a lot better.
A colored ZX81 manual. That is a thing I never had saw :) Thank you.
I was tempted to buy the SInclair but I bought the Commodore Vic20 because it had color.
There was the ZX Spectrum which has color.
It's making me crazy because you are saying Zee instead of Zed even though I'm an American
Jonathan B Even the people who worked for the American division of Sinclair called it "Zee X"! Insisting that it must be pronounced "Zed X" even in the USA is simply revisionist history created by individuals too young to remember when the ZX81 was new.
Neat I don't even know why the British call it Zed
+Jonathan B "I don't even know why the British call it Zed" Americans are in the minority here... www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/why-do-the-british-pronounce-z-as-zed/ Even the Dutch are at it... (click speaker icon) www.heardutchhere.net/DutchPronunciation.html
+Stappit Fu I have never in my life before youtube and seeing british people on it heard anybody call the letter Z pronounced Zee called Zed.
+lum otaku The letter "Z" was always pronounced 'zed' since the inception of the english language. Out of all english speaking countries only the US changed the pronunciation to 'zee' for some unknown reason. Even in Canada it's pronounced 'zed'.
I have/had the Timex Sinclair 1000.... should be the same thing. I got a few hours of fun out of it. Bought it at a yard sale for 5-10$
I love your channel. You review the most random interesting things in a very informative way. Keep up the great work.
I did actually use mine as a door stop. But I wish I had kept it. So nostalgic. I can remember the shop I purchased it from and how much it cost. WHSmith in Canterbury Kent Uk, Price was £99 more expensive than US but still cheaper than anything else in UK at time. At the time there was nothing else to be honest. Believe it or not you could get very fast at typing the programs in after a while. Peek and Poke were the best as you could write machine code with this little beast very easily using those two key commands.
I can remember that Sinclair ZX81. But my first "real" computer was Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Beutiful mashine with color graphix and sound..... I have in my foggy memory, that Sinclari first makes the S80 model before ZX81 (?). Regards from Dalsbruk, Finland.
+Stig Österberg Den hette ZX80 och kom 1979.
I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 back in the 90s. It suffered the same fate with the keyboard though and in my case the cable was broken to far to be salvageable. Also all of the screw posts broke off during disassembly. It ended up getting trashed.
No. The Acorn Electron was never sold here. The BBC Micro was available in the USA, but very few were sold, and most of the U.S. models were shipped back to the UK, converted to European power and video standards, and used in schools there. I believe the Archimedes series was available in Canada, but I've never heard of it being sold in the USA.
I have one of those at home and it was labeled as Timex/Sinclair brand computer and it was my first computer and it came with 3k of ram and the 16k ram expansion adapter and I had it too. I used it until the power cable broke on the inside of the computer.
Great review!. Replacement newly fabricated keyboard membranes can be bought on-line - I replaced the original one on my ZX-81 with one of the new membranes, now the keyboard will outlast the rest of the computer :-)
my parents had the sinclair 1000 which cost the same price but never had any acessories for it. they used a cassette deck that had mic jacks on it to be able to use tapes on it. i never played with it sadly but i wish i could get another one sometime.
I love how old tech in some ways can be so much better than new (your tv working with pal). I never knew that you could get a pal signal to display on a ntsc tv. I suppose it helps that the pal signal is black and white to begin with. I learned something new today, Thanks. Now I'm off to watch your MC-10 video ;)
The ZX Spectrum does have colour, only 8 true colours but there is a light/dark option so 16, the RAM (in the traditional rubber keyed versions) went up to 48K, they're great machines, I have 3, they have a much faster CPU than the commodore 64! Oh you can get replacement membranes, the new ones are UV proof so won't go brittle
Sony Trinitron wrong
15 colours, since bright black is still black. ;) but you also had flash, which swapped the ink and paper (foreground and background) a few times a second.
@@lawrencemanning 1.6 hz, i think ..
I like LGR, but he was wrong. Letters, words, and product names are pronounced differently in different countries. For example, in the USA, Hyundai is pronounced "hun-day", while in the UK, it's pronounced "hyoon-deye". In this case, Sinclair Research's U.S. division would clearly be using the U.S. pronounciation for their product names!
I kind of regret not asking my dad to get me the kit version of this, but he ended up getting me a Commodore 64 a year later.
I had the Sinclair Spectrum with the built in disk drive. I was addicted to it haha. I regret giving it away in 1996.
There is no sinclar zx spectrum with a built in disk drive. You are either mis-remembering or a liar.
Although this cheap, "farty" little British computer with its annoying keyboard was never popular in the US, it at least got some American computer manufacturers to significantly drop their prices in order to compete with it, thus allowing many more ordinary Americans to purchase home computers during the 1980s.
farty?? the zedex spectrum 48k was pretty good, so was the amstrad cpc, both british, but the 64 rooled the world.
A lot of the modern LCD TV's support PAL standard, even ones sold in the USA, my 2007 Insignia and my 2010 Sony LCD's handle PAL RF video just fine, they switch automatically when it detects a PAL or NTSC signal.
My second computer, I still have mine. However I don’t have my ZX80 as I sold it to help buy this one.
Back in the 80s i had a sinclair zx81, it was my first computer, comes with a b/w tv from my dad. finally the computer was garbage.. often had problems to type in commands, some keys stopped working. i remember if the ram was almost empty, the sinclair was getting slower slower.. anyway nice to see it
That was my first computer in year 82 or 83. After that I did get Spectrum+ and its power did wreck so I did make power to it from zx-81 power. I have both in my storage :)
+Anonymous Binarytrader Sell them! they sell for a good bit these days on eBay
Bad thing is that keyboard membrane of ZX-81 did go broken. I think but it did work. Also power is gone.
Anonymous Binarytrader You can get brand new replacements these days for £10, with the power supply. Sinclair sold the ZX80/81 with a 9V DC PowerSuppy. +9V is the tip of the 3.5mm mono jack
700mA for the use without Sinclair-printer 1200mA for the use with Sinclair-printer
450mA is the power comsumption of an unexpanded ZX81. You can use the same psu for ZX80/ZX81. A Spectrum psu will not work, only because it has an other type of plug.
I know. I did make Spectrum+ power from ZX-81 power because it did go broken so I had to change it (nip/nap cord, and connect again.)
Great vid - didn't know sinclair sold micros there before Timex did.
Our junior high school got a ZX1000 or ZX81 in 1980. We also had a TRS-80 Model I.
The Sinclair computer did have a printer attached. It was a narrow thermal type on grey coloured paper, like one of the TRS-80 mobile printers of the day. Pretty useless.
I guess those machines were fine for learning BASIC, but that's about it.
I just bought one in the box from a thrift store for $5 today. :-)
I love your channel, I like HIFI but I have never really studied software development.
The earlier ZX80 used no custom parts and could be upgraded to ZX81 spec. As a result, you can build your own ZX80/81 using standard off-the-shelf parts.
I imagine that the ZX81 would be quite rear over there. It was released to late to have an impact, if you had had it released a year before and the Specky in 82, it could have been quite different.
An American version of the ZX Spectrum was available by mail order from Sinclair Research for $299, but I've never seen one. Timex initially planned to sell the Spectrum as the Timex-Sinclair 2000, but they decided it wasn't good enough to compete in the U.S. market, so they gave it a better keyboard, better graphics, better sound, built-in joystick ports, and a built-in cartridge slot, and called it the Timex-Sinclair 2068 -- which ended up being a major failure because it was released too late, and even with the upgrades it couldn't compete with the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL.
I remember Crazy Eddie selling the Timex Sinclair next to the C=64, so that people could use it to get a rebate offered by Commodore.
I think the Timex cost ten bucks and the rebate was a hundred... but it was thirty years ago and hard for me to remember precisely.
Anyone else remember?
I've heard of the Timex selling for as low as $20 by 1983... but knowing Crazy Eddie's shady business practices, they probably did sell it for even less than that! And people did the same thing with software... they'd buy an old version of a program at a closeout sale price, just to use it to get the "competitive ugprade" discount on the new program they did want.
as for sound, add ons by 3rd parties were available, or even self build versions, using mainly the AY-3-8912 chip (giving it much better sound capabilities than the spectrum 😉) a 'semi clone' of the zx81, the lambda 8300/power 3000/'your computer' had an optional colour module, which i've read 'in theory' could be made to work with a zx81 but very awkward, you need to composite mod the zx81, and theres no default initialisation or commands to drive it within the zx81 rom, obviously,.... the lambda rom cannot be drop in fitted into a zx81 to make it work due to a few differences in lambda hardware, but i think 'may'/should be possible as an external rom, limiting it patching out the internal rom to below address 7680, (zx81 stores the font bitmap in its rom 7680 to 8191, lambda has it stored in an rom internal to its ula, using those addresses for the extra stuff) but then the keyboard functions/punctuation arrangement is different, so it would need an altered version of the rom to suit!! probably too much hassle overall 😁 the lambda also has limited sound capability, but i havent as yet seen any info how its done, presumably as no separate sound chip, single bit IO port....
I've always wondered what happens when you plug the power supply into a regular headphone jack, since the TS1000 power supply uses the same connector as an audio jack.
Although the voltage is different, that's basically what I did here: Can 2.46 volts kill an iPod? (line level to mic input test)
I have one of those, plus thermal printer and a few games, frogger etc.
Doh! Sorry I knocked the RAM expansion again!
So you should be able to debug the onboard memory by plugging in the expansion?
The other classic British home computer, the Amstrad CPC, was it ever sold in the United States ? According to wiki only the CPC 6128 saw the light of day in America. So i assume that to Americans it must be a pretty obscure computer
Greg Lyris Yes, both the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro were briefly sold in the USA, but they were not successful here and were quickly discontinued.
I'm not sure if it was an official thing from Amstrad itself... Seems like it was imported by sellers in Chicago.
Jonathan Doe Much like you then.
oh cool this one time at my high school i was asked with a bunch of other people in my computer class to clean out some old stuff in the basemen and we found like 150 of those things and screens for them two they all when to the recycling except for a few one went into a display cabinet at the school and two or three went home with a computer geek friend of mine
Saying ZX like 'Zee Ex' is like calling Sega 'Seega'
Yeah, I stole an analogy from Lazy Game Reviews, but he has a point.
Nice demo, but I wasn't impressed with the Sinclair back then. I remember checking out Timex Sinclair 1000 that was on display with a monitor at a department store around 1982-3. And compared to a Commodore Vic-20, C=64 and other American computers of the time, I thought the Sinclair felt too cheap and toy-like with the membaine keyboard. And the graphics and sound didn't impress me. I've since checked out Sinclair game demos and it looks like a fun computer despite it's limitations.
I had a C64, a ZX81 and still have the Spectrum. In my opinion there are no such things as "toy" or "business" or whatever computers. A computer is what you make of it. I've seen these three "limited" computers do amazing things for their time and hardware.
How I miss those days...
+Daniel T.
So true, those early computers did a lot of work for how limited they were. Now we have computers with thousands more processing power doing less work. I wasn't trying to call the Sinclair a toy. It just felt like one compared to the C-64 which had a real keyboard and peripherals like disk drives, modems, printers, monitors etc with better USA sales and support in the 80's.
*****
Greetings from Portugal to Texas I assume!
You're absolutely right and I blame that on Sir Clive Sinclair for having such a wonderful machine and also for being so poor exporting it to the rest of the world.
Unlike the the ZX 81 the ZX Spectrum (the C64 competitor) had lots of peripherals and software but didn't really go much further than UK, Europe and one or other country like Brasil. Had it made to US and/or Japan it might had been more popular than the C64, wich was what happened in Europe (in general) mostly because of its low-cost.
Daniel T. It wasn't really that they did a bad job of exporting it so much as they had issues just trying to meet demand at home.
TheTurnipKing
You're right. I remember reading something from the mid-80's about that. It was something like "Clive Sinclair always wanted his company to be manageable" wich meant that Sinclair Research never grew when it could.
His line of products suffered greatly from that: components supply and assembly, overall build quality and demand.
I've read this book and it refers to this point as well as all the other mistakes Clive Sinclair did:
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/books/SinclairStoryThe.pdf
Thta's a ribbon connector of sorts, isn't it? Couldn't that keyboard connector be replaced?
No, it's actually just an extension of the keyboard's circuit board. It's not as flexible as a real ribbon cable, that's why it cracks so easily.
+vwestlife So basically, you'd need to replace the whole membrane? Damn, that does suck. No wonder people got new keyboards and cases.
Outta try that with my Samsung LCD set I bought 4-5 years ago.
Very nice video Kevin, thank you.
What about the Timex Sinclair 1000?
See my follow-up video: th-cam.com/video/TTYH5RKixX0/w-d-xo.html
Wow. I'm so happy I never received one of these for Christmas as a kid.
Commodore 64 , while loadimg cassette, makes desktop disappear. Not with the vic20, strangely
Jesus that keyboard dough
The ZX81 has a small but enthusiastic following in the UK; even today, geeks, retro gamers and eccentrics are developing home-grown software for it :)
Hardware, too!
Hey, vwestlife, you still running that radio station of yours? :)
I just found mine on a shelf.
Well you're American, so you can call it "zee" if you want to :-)
Not a bad little computer... this seems like something you'd buy if you were interested in computers, but not sure if you're ready for a big system. Also, cool little trick, connecting a PAL unit to a NTSC TV. If I ever come across a PAL computer, VCR, etc, I'll know what to do, because I have an appropriate TV.
Nice CD too. I wonder who introduced you to his music ;-)
Wasn’t this computers onscreen weirdness when you load a cassette game the origin of the raster bars.
The raster bars are caused by the TV, not the computer. The computer's video signal goes out of sync when it's loading or saving data on cassette, thus causing the TV to display a distorted image.
But is this not the start of the raster bars usage on other machines? I thought this bug instead of being fixed and eliminated was then retained & used to give useful information on the status of the loading process in the border of the screen on other machines.
You're probably right about it being the inspiration, but on other machines the "raster bars" are a deliberate effect produced by the program changing the colors of the border area, rather than an unintentional effect caused by an out-of-tune TV.
Yeah, I agree.
My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000, it was hard to learn but it did teach you how to program. It also was the best looking computer on the market. :-) In England the Spectrum is so popular today that a Kickstarter project designed and built a next generation ZX Spectrum called ZX Spectrum Next. This project raised over $1.7M in the first release and is already over another $1.5M in it’s second release. Funny there wasn’t the same community support for a next generation Commodore C64, why is that if that was the better computer?
I like the explanation of the 'Zee'! Tee-Hee or perhaps Ted-Hed...
I had one,I also had a vic20,the vic20 was a lot faster.........Apple was just coming onto the scene..........Ah,the memories!!!
There is a Timex Sinclair on shopgoodwill.com right now.
Do you have any arcorn computers?
It can be zee or zed! Don't argue with a guy who has a spectral energy processor!
THe Vic 20 was better in every concievable way to learn basic on.
I've gotten used to the ZX Spectrum keyboard, and I find having to only press one key for what you want better, and less time consuming, mind you it takes time to get used to it.
Did the VIC-20, or any other computer than a ZX, for that matter, warn you if you tried to input a program line or command with a syntax error in it? The ZX'es did just that, ensureing that at least the program was syntactically correct.
And in the UK the VIC20 was four times the price.
Thank you
Who bought a ZX81 + a keyboard + a metalcase?
For the price of these 3 items you could buy a real computer! Or two.
ö. . , I suspect that very much depends on where you live. The C64 wasn't the equivalent of $99 in the UK until the end of its life. By which time several versions of the Sinclair Spectrum had been released. The ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum were designed to be cheap, so anybody could get one. Most other contemporary computers were much more expensive. The Vic 20 was pretty much end of life by then, but still more than the Sinclair.
keep up with then video's man
My father and I programmed on one here in Canada. It was brutal thanks to that hideous keyboard.
there is nothing new really in computer input tool that was wad around 35 years ago chiplet keyboards to save and money, touch membrain keyboards for touch secitive controls, only a lot of refinment like chiplet keay on most laptops theses days and plastic or class touch screen. on modern microwaves sill uss soft membrain touch keypad which feel like to press the pad controls pushing finger totally right though the control panel
so strange to see a UK home computer in the USA, i thought that the USA back in the days shunde stuff from the UK.
if your intrestered i have "bits" of ZX48 the more commonly known sinclair, i've no use for them i just simple save them from the rubbish
wtf is a zx48
1 KB of ram! !!!!
a friend of mine ran a travel business with that . he had all that and a okidata printer . he kater gave it to a misinary who wrote his sermons on it as did my friend . my rriend was a ordained priest in the episcopal church. ( now deceaced ) eggscllent video
That has to be one of the cheapest computers I have ever even heard about. Not even a power switch! Were it any cheaper there would be no display of any kind.
Never heard anyone call on eof those a ZEE x81. You've obviously been told several thousand times it's not called that! Funny stuff. Nice bit of kit though. Like your vids
It's called that here in the USA. We say Zee instead of Zed.
I know. My wife is American, so I know all the strange differences. That product is British, so its name is ZX81. Not Zee x81
And the Z80 processor in it is an American product, so it's Zee-80, not Zed-80!
Haha touche! :-D
Correct. British home computer manufacturers simply imported the parts. I noted that a company named
Ferranti made copies of American 74 series logic chips, but made sure to switch the pinouts. This made things awkward, when trying to repair legacy equipment. Ferranti had folded years earlier, so I had to make small botch boards to reassign the pinouts for the replacement chips.
all zx81s (and zx80s) are adaptable for 50 or 60 hz frame rate, add a resistor to a uk 50hz model to turn it to 'ntsc' standard 60hz,, and remove resistor on a us one for 50hz! unfortunately with the faster scan, and interrupt rate, it 'computes' slower!
and i think similar for a us ts1500, to convert to 50hz , fitting a 16k rampack on those gives you 32k, the internal 16k is shifted up the memory map, and the add on pack takes its space over, unfortunately you cant use the higher ram easily and cannot run machine code in there, without mods, or have your basic program/variables encroach into it, with display file straddling the address 32768 as this will cause problems
I dont want to be some kind of ass... but, it's a b/w signal only, so the difference is not really _between NTSC and PAL_, rather between the 525 lines/60Hz standard in the USA and the 625 lines/50Hz standard in Europe.
+Sven Ekeberg The term "NTSC" applies to both B&W and color signals using the 525/60 standard; and for the sake of brevity, I referred to the 625/50 standard as "PAL", since that's a term more people are familiar with.
Herr Friberger I'm not a PAL expert but the term NTSC goes back to 1941 and thus predates color. NTSC, as a standard covered the entirety of a broadcast television signal not just the color portion. Black and white 4:3 video with monaural sound can be NTSC, as could a color 16:9 video with stereo audio.
pal is the only way to fly,ask rob hubbard about the speed of his music :p
but its pronounced 'zed'x-81' because its british
Then why do the British pronounce the American-made Z80 CPU "Zed 80"? If you follow the same rule, they should call it the "Zee 80"!
Actually it was the British who deliberately changed their language in the past few hundred years (look up "Received Pronunciation"). Americans today pronounce words closer to the way the British did in the 1700s and earlier: www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
@@vwestlife eh? Are you on drugs?
@@kenmeade9924 why would he say it the British way when he is American. We say “zee” not zed.
So what. Westlife is American, and he's in America, so it's his prerogative to pronounce it the American way. ZedEx sounds like a courier.
had one
Hearing you say ZEE X does sound a bit wrong, probably because I always thought it was sold in the USA as the Timex Sinclair 1000.
And isn't the ZX81 still a good looking machine, regardless of what you have to say about its (lack of) capabilities? Seriously, somebody get the moulds for the ZX81, the maker community would be all over this sticking every model of devboard they could lay their hands on!
Didn't Timex release a version of the ZX Spectrum?
So in the UK, computers came with entire BASIC courses, in the US you get a slim pamphlet. Either they didn't expect Americans to do anything with the unit, or they expected Americans to pay for the material we Brits got in the manual with the computer. Which is odd, as I remember getting the TRS-80 Color Computer as a kid (in the UK where we were could have got even the Dragon 32 or 64 which was a better version of the CoCo) and the manual was a gigantic tome with a full course in BASIC... as was the manual for the Commodore 64C that I got in 1989.
Even the Amiga 1200 that I got in 1992, while it didn't have any dialect of BASIC (or indeed any programming language) it had a technical reference which carried pinouts of all the ports on it.
Now you get a slip of A3 with two paragraphs in 72 languages (something Brexit won't change) and a diagram.
Also, newer American TVs can't adapt to 625 line PAL? I have a CRT TV from the 1990s that can deal with PAL (obviously) and NTSC without rolling and in full colour (assuming the Raspberry Pi outputs proper NTSC by default over its composite jack)
Why is it European TVs with SCART sockets can accept NTSC but an American TV can't even accept PAL (let alone SECAM)?
Not that I expect a European TV to decode ATSC digital TV.
Isn't the Micro Color Computer a size reduced Color Computer?
Timex showed a US version of the ZX Spectrum at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1983, called the Timex-Sinclair 2000. But people didn't like its rubber keyboard and its sound and graphics weren't as good as the competition, so Timex totally redesigned it with a better keyboard, more RAM, better graphics and sound, built-in cartridge and joystick ports, etc. and introduced it in 1984 as the Timex-Sinclair 2068. But it came out too late and was too expensive, and all those changes made it incompatible with most Spectrum software, so it didn't sell well and Timex cancelled it and got out of the computer business only a few months later.
Its Zed or Zee since its British
But I'm American so I say Zee.
VWestlife yes, but because the machine is british it's "wrong", an excuse will be if it was an US machine... sort of...
zed is how u say it
...in the UK. But I'm in the USA, and we say it "zee" here.
that computer is tiny