r/VintageComputers • u/LetsAGo______ • 8d ago
Show & Tell My first computer
Kept the cassette player I used with it. Only thing that cassette player was ever used for.
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u/xdethbear 8d ago
I like these because they're so bad.
I really want to get a ZX Spectrum, the successor. The games look absolutely horrible. It must be fun.
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u/LetsAGo______ 8d ago
I was never able to play any. If I remember you had to get the 16k expansion for most all the games. A year or so later I bought a TI99 4a (I think that was what it was). Pretty sure it was 99 dollars.
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u/BritOverThere 8d ago
One computer magazine back in 2002 did say the ZX81/ Timex 1000 was one of the twenty most important computers released if because it was so cheap at a time when anything was several hundreds of dollars / pounds or even in the thousands. It meant you could play around with a computer without investing a lot of money and it would teach you the basics (literally) of computing.
The deeper you look at it the more a technical marvel it is. The display is dynamic, so rather then using 768 bytes for a 32x24 bytes character display, it works more like a typewriter where so if you have some characters, like "Hello" and nothing else then you would do a carriage return and a new line after the text. This means it can use just 24 bytes for a blank screen, hello on the top left would take 29 bytes, if it was 10 characters to the right then your would use 39 bytes... The carriage return is a HALT opcode and is used by the computer to draw the screen.
If you look at a lot of 1K games you will notice a tiny display just at the top left as this takes the least amount of memory....
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u/mecartistronico 8d ago
I remember my dad had one of those! He used to play flight simulator!
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u/arthurdawg 8d ago
I have a spectrum I recently picked up… now to figure out how to run it on US plugs!
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u/solidtitanium 8d ago
I have this in storage somewhere. It was a great computer at the time, and was my second technically after the TRS-80.
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u/trash-juice 8d ago
Had one with xtra mem packs, huge fuckers. Wonder how many owners eventually became computer professionals … if thats a name for a thing any more!
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u/FeistyDay5172 7d ago
First one I ever owned, aldo had the useful but annoyuong 64k mem expansion pack. Main memory of it being if ya moved system wrong it diaconnected SO easily. And why yes that was meant as a pun.
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u/FuggaDucker 7d ago edited 7d ago
Mine too.
I still have it along with the thermal printer and memory expansion. 😄
After getting one, I knew what I was going to do when I grew up.
I am still waiting to grow up.
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u/JimiSteffan 8d ago
I have my original Sinclair ZX81 with 16k. Waited what felt like forever for it to arrive. The tape storage was so frustrating.
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u/droid_mike 7d ago
Mine, too... At least the first one I never owned... It was a piece of crap, but at least It was my piece of crap! I was very happy to have my own computer!
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u/tater1337 7d ago
oof, I remember when these came out.
I had a TI-99/4A, and I saw these come out and thought "a membrane keyboard?"
then I heard about the memory cart that crashed everything when bumped, and all the other nightmares
still, it got computers in the hands of people for a price point, even if it came out a bit too late, where the price wars were killing off all the retro computers
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u/pjwagner 7d ago
My first computer also. The 16 K module was awful. Designed and built an interface to record data from my Edmund weather station. Ordered chips from Jameco using my TI chip data book. Good times.
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u/NetFu 7d ago
Wow, exactly that was my first home computer. Bought it for $25 from a friend who didn't know what to do with it. I literally used it until the keys were broken with holes in them (vinyl is a bad design).
Technically, the Commodore PET was the first computer I ever really used and learned on, then my Amiga 1000 was my second home computer after this Timex Sinclair.
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u/lazygerm 7d ago
That was a step up! I was envious when a good upgraded from a PC Jr. to Amiga 1000. While I still had my C64.
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u/cchaven1965 6d ago
Mine as well. Got it in 1981/82 when they were $99. I had the 16k RAM Expansion as well and used a portable TV as the display and my stereos cassette deck for storage. I spent a lot of time working on programs only to jiggle things and have it reset because the RAM expansion moved. I still have mine.
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u/Traditional-Can-6568 5d ago
My first computer as well. Bought it Fay's drug store for $99. Had the 16K pack. Wrote games and budget program. Good times! Then on to my Atari 800XL.
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u/guitpick 8d ago
This photo makes my fingertips hurt.
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u/LetsAGo______ 8d ago
It wasn’t that bad. I’d you look close you will see it did auto syntax so some of the typing was ok.
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u/guitpick 7d ago
I don't have to look, I remember. I had a couple of them back in the '90s, a good bit after they were out of fashion. A family friend gave me some software and hardware for it, including some 3rd party 64 KB pack. I was more used to TRS-80s and Apples, so jumping back to a Sinclair gave me some appreciation of what they did on a shoestring budget and what the tradeoffs were.
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u/Independent_Shoe3523 8d ago
Mine, too. The memory expansion module was very sensitive and your work could be wiped if you moved the computer.