The TS-1000

I love talking about that old machine.

We’re talking early 80s here. I was living in Questa, New Mexico, and we’d just got our tax return in. Now, I’ve always been fascinated by computers. I built my first computer when I was 11. And since men had just walked on the Moon, that tells you how long ago that was.

I’d gone to the library to learn about computers and discovered we had exactly two books on the subject. One was a textbook, and it was long on theory but short on how to do something. The other was a basic electronics book, and reading it, I discovered how a digital computer worked. Thinking about it, I realized I could do something that did more than add numbers. I built a system that played Tic-Tac-Toe. It was an angle thing built of cannibalized parts, but it worked.

So, it’s safe to say my first computer was a gaming machine.

Flash forward almost fifteen years.

Computers are invading workplaces. Atari is making money hand over fist with its gaming consoles. And I want to study computers and learn a little more. Radio Shack had the Timex-Sinclair (TS)-1000. It was sold for $90.00 and was about the size of a book. It had a whopping 1K worth of internal memory, and for another hundred dollars, you could bump it up to 16K. The keyboard was a touchpad, and you had to hook the thing up to your television set to use it.

But it was a real computer. You could do some basic programming through it, and I figured out how to take a game we’d played on our programmable calculators called Moon Lander and adapt it. And if you wanted to save your programs, you had to save them to, of all things, a cassette tape recorder.

And that’s about as far as that little box went.

But it was a real computer, and while it was limited, it sure pointed toward things to come.