Timex-Sinclair 1000 This was the very first computer I ever bought, and that same machine is still part of this collection. I spent many a hour with the little Timex- Sinclair 1000, connected to a portable B/W television set for a monitor and my home stereo equipment for the mass storage, honing my skills in BASIC programming. This system is amazing in that it is very compact and it has a total of four chips on it's mainboard! It used a Z80 cpu, and had 2k of RAM standard, and included an odd version of BASIC in ROM, as well as having a small 40-key membrane keyboard that automatically typed the BASIC statements and commands depending on which key was pressed. Due to it's price, originally $99 at it's introduction in 1982, it is the system that introduced a lot of people to computers in the United States. This system was the U.S. release of the Sinclair ZX-81, with an additional 1k RAM.

The machine offered the following video modes (as taken from the ZX-81 FAQ):

Eventually, there were a lot of add-ons available for this system, such as printers, expansion interfaces, RAM, and even keyboard upgrades which gave you a real keyboard, from companies such as Gladstone Electronics. There were also quite a few commercial applications, from games to financial management tools, available on cassette tape. Most of these required an expanded machine with 16k of RAM, though there were a few that would run on the standard 2k machine. There was a chess game released that would run in 1k of RAM. The system was eventually redesigned, including the 16k RAM expansion as part of the system itself, and dubbed the T/S-1500.

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