Yes, the Timex vs Atari was not a fair fight at all. The Atari 8-bits were amazing machines.

I do wish I’d picked up a TS1000 at some point and maybe I eventually will. It seems like a fun thing to have around, even though I know I’ll rarely use it.

Adding to my own post, as I hit ‘post’ too quickly.

At the time, I never heard anything about Timex’s computer aspirations or the team leading their erstwhile, short-lived computer efforts – and I’ve never heard anything about it in all the retro history-digging that’s happened since. I mean, in a world where you can learn the pizza preferences of anyone named Tramiel and which model of private jet Irving Gould flew back and forth to the Bahamas, it’s maybe a little odd there’s zero info (to my knowledge) on the people or plan behind Timex’s corporate adventure into computers.

I suspect that may be because, there was no plan and (almost) no people behind it. I think it was an attempt to get in on a “hot” new consumer category by slapping a *vaguely* related but still well-known, old consumer brand on a computer and pushing it through Timex’s distribution channels. In retrospect, what we saw in the market is consistent with that theory. There were a handful of national launch ads, a few follow-up ads in computer trades and mostly co-op marketing funded retailer ads. Co-op marketing is where the manufacturer gives the retailer a partial rebate on their order in exchange for the retailer featuring the product in their ads and/or in-store end caps. This would have been the standard distribution ‘push-through’ playbook back then for the sales force of a mass market brand like Timex. And when the product sell-in didn’t sell-through very well, Timex dropped it like the fleeting cash grab it was.

If other info exists countering this hypothesis, I’d actually be *delighted* to be proven wrong. It would be somehow reassuring to discover there was a small team of product people at Timex who passionately believed in consumer computing and had a plan to sweep the market (no matter how misguided that plan may have been).

Of course today I have a pristine example of every model of UK Sinclair and US Timex Sinclair in my collection, but even back then, the early Sinclairs never caught my interest. As you said, they just didn’t compare well to against any of the $200-$400 competition – and that keyboard… Although the later Sinclairs did get pretty interesting, even before the 68K-based QL. The Spectrum line was decent but they were, unfortunately, only commonly available in the UK so they remained only something interesting to read about in imported magazines at the time.