Timex Sinclair 1500

The Timex Sinclair 1500 Learning Package

Sinclair's low cost computer designs must have caused more than a few sleepless nights around the computer industry in the early 1980s, but the truth was that their early ZX81 (known as the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA) had serious shortcomings that prevented it from becoming more than a novelty.

Timex was Sinclair's North American manufacturing and sales partner, and in mid 1983 they introduced the Timex Sinclair 1500 in an attempt to fix a couple of the ZX81's most glaring warts: the ZX81's infamous membrane touch-panel was replaced by a "real" chicklet-based design (taken from the new color Sinclair Spectrum), and the memory was expanded to a respectable 16K (up from the Timex 1000's measly 1024 bytes). The display was still B&W, and the standard machine was incapable of making sound unless thrown.

The TS 1500 was priced at an astounding $79.95. It didn't sell well because the industry's dirty little secret was that most low-cost machines spent their lives as fancy videogame consoles -- and the TS1500 couldn't compete with the rainbow of color and sound (can one have a rainbow of sound?) produced by the competition.

Background:

The Timex-Sinclair 1500 is basically a Sinclair ZX-81 in a ZX Spectrum case with 16 KB RAM.
Timex marketed the Sinclair computers on the North American market. The ZX-81 was sold as the TS-1000 (with 2 KB RAM instead of 1 KB of the original model) and the ZX Spectrum as the forth-coming TS-2000 (which remained a prototype). As the sales of the TS-1000 were dangerously falling, Timex produced a mix between the ZX-81 and the ZX Spectrum: the TS-1500. The goal was to correct the weaknesses of the TS-1000: too small memory and awful keyboard.
It's in fact just a ZX-81 with the 16 KB RAM expansion built inside a Spectrum style case. But the original black case turned silver for the TS-1500. To prove that it is exactly the Spectrum case re-used here, there is still the speaker grid underneath the system, whereas the TS-1500 has no sound feature! However there are minor cosmetic changes: the "sinclair" carved logo on top of the case is replaced by a fake grid... In fact, this plastic case was the TS-2000 one (which was never produced), reused here for the TS-1500.
The chicklet keyboard was touted as an improvement over the flat membrane keyboard of the ZX-81. The keys layout is exactly the same as the ZX Spectrum. Apart from that it remains a TS-1000. The connectors are the same (RF TV output, tape recorder, expansion bus) and the Basic is still the Sinclair Basic. A 16k RAM expansion (the same as the one sold for the TS-1000) can be used to reach 32 KB RAM.
Despite its funky look, the TS-1500 did not sell well either. In 1983, who wanted to buy a ZX-81 disguised whereas you could offer yourself a splendid Commodore 64 for a few more bucks!

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