Timex was a major cause in the failure of software sales for the TS-1000. Timex did not offer the 16k expansion units until several months after the TS-1000 was released. Most software for the TS-1000 needed 16K. Yes, that means that Timex was trying to sell software back in 1982 that could not run on the TS-1000. That had a secondary effect of preventing additional TS-1000 software from reaching store shelves since the stores were already filled with tapes that didn’t sell. After Timex dropped out of the computer business, third parties imported Memotech memory expansion but that was too late to save the software businesses.

None of those companies did software for the ZX-81 which did have respectable software sales in the UK. It would be a challenge to turn games intended for 32K Ataris and turn them into something that runs on a 16K TS-1000 let alone the unexpanded 2K TS-1000. The Spectrum could handle the requirements and there were a number of successful ports over to it.

And again there was zero uptick in software sales. Look at the anemic views of the Timex Sinclair Fans, and you’ll see that there was zero penetration. i know the mythos of the Sinclair having world wide reach is big, but trust me it had zero impact in the west. The far more interesting thing is the iron curtain where it was torn apart, cloned and they still publish games to this day.

Ever notice that EA, Activision, Epyx have no Timex 1000 hits? The machine didn’t sell anywhere near these numbers, or garner any attention.

The major evidence of the volume of Timex Sinclair systems sold in the US is the circulation numbers for Sync magazine which focused on the Timex Sinclair line. Sync sold about 60,000 copies an issue. Expected attachment rates would be one magazine copy for every 10 computers though the low cost of Timex might lead to fewer magazine sales compared to more expensive computers.

The QL network was limited in speed plus had many other problems. There were few installations with multiple QLs so QL Net got little support. I think Junet from Poland used on the Elwro 800 Junior Spectrum clone was derived from ZX Net which is the Spectrum version of the QL’s network. Junet had disk drive and printer sharing. I believe there was even a Junet expansion card for IBM PC compatible machines.

I keep hearing that number of half a million but there would be some kind of residual evidence of it, if it was anywhere near that many. The lack of either praise or condemnation of the machine makes me wonder if it was another miniscribe/brick factory thing, or if they made that many and they got crushed and sent to visit ET.

Also being software incompatible meant that there was zero software, and again if there really was .5 million you’d think some UK software houses would want that easy market as there was such a low bar to get into there, and yet it never happened. So where was all the UK software houses on this half a million installed base just waiting for software?

Announcing the QL far too ahead of time to get in front of the Macintosh was silly, but it was far too 8bit feeling to go anywhere, and those microdrives were just far too small. A 360kb disk drive would have gone a LONG way, just as having the OS in disk would have helped shipping that part ASAP as all you need to do is initialize the hardware and load a bootblock. Again Sinclair was too evolutionary with spite on the QL, not revolutionary like the leap from the C64 to the Atari ST, outsider projects like the Amiga, or expandable to grow like the PC. It was the ‘I will ensure you can’t game on this thing!’… thing. with inferior storage.

The real sad thing on the QL was built in networking, and yet LAN stuff just didn’t catch on, no email, no QL server, no QLMAX or whatever, no SMTP, no BIG memory/Hard disk server, or application servers. All the groundwork was there, but they ignored what businesses wanted/needed.

The QL has several problems. Announcing the release shipping in 28 days without a working prototype never ends well. The 68008 cost the same as the 68000 in 1984. The microdrives weren’t close to reliable until 1986 but businesses want to store data immediately.

I’m sure stuff like IDN’s and unicode break it, as the amount of spam comments I get is nothing short of astronomical. When it went over a thousand a day I had to do something about it being more on the deny side than permit. Which I know really sucks.

With audio cassettes being so cheap to produce for mailing Im surprised it didn’t catch on pre-internet. It’d have been better for some kind of tape to disk program set, although it’s weird just how much people refused to buy peripherals for computers, outside of joysticks.

PS. Your comment form seems break if the e-mail uses an IDN