Same here!

Yep. BASIC program.

That was WHY it was marketed. Sinclair, and even Timex when they partnered with him, never believed the ZX-81/TS-1000 would last all that long in the market, and it's profitability was inherently limited. Clive Sinclair hoped to whet the appetites of price-sensitive would-be home users, and he DID succeed in that strategy in the UK by the ZX-81s successor, the Spectrum (originally dubbed the ZX-82). Obviously forty years of tech have rendered all those 8-bit home computers into the realm of nostalgia, no different that a 1952 DuMont TV would be laughable compared to any given CRT-based TV of the early 90s, let alone the cheap flat-screens one can easily get at Walley World.

Same. It wet my beak in computing in so many ways. To me, the Timex Sinclair 1000 was the pioneer in affordable computers for newbies at the time.

I have one. Somewhere in my storage unit….

Funny how Coleco bombed because of build quality problems, yet people tolerated the same from Sinclair. Awful company.

@@gdutfulkbhh7537 Sinclair ZX Spectrum was affordable and it worked.

True and it does say Life in America... Iwas an Atari VCS, 800XL and 800XE fanboy in Scotland, even with the ZX's being built in Dundee haha ;O)

Disco is…Dead, thank God.” x Dr. Johnny Fever

I remember the USSR had a lot of early micro clones circulating around it, most developed from reverse engineering Western units (presumably) bought through the DDR. I had the usual pair of 80s systems (A Spectrum 128, a Vic-20) but as a man who's becoming increasingly comfortable with Cyrillic and has always had a love of the rudimentary 70s/80s Russian technology, what I'd *love* to have is a Russian C64 clone... 😇

Were the Soviet computers priced so the average person could afford to own them, or were these reserved for elite party members?@@dieseldragon6756

I was living in the UK in 1983 and bought a ZX81. At the time it was amazing and I had it for years. From memory it had 2k of onboard memory and a 16k plug in of RAM which is shown in this video. Great stuff and a start in computing which for me turned into a business which my partner and I ran for 11 years.

@@potrzebieneuman4702 Minor correction; it was 1K of onboard memory in the unexpanded ZX81 (about 512 bytes of which was usable for programs). :)

​@@danieljones9937 Correct. As an interesting aside the Timex 1000 (the US release of the ZX81) did indeed have 2k as standard The follow up T1500 had a "whopping" 16k and was placed inside a keyboard case that mirrored the "dead flesh" keys of the 16/48k Speccy The 2068 was actually a great little machine, but the lack of inherent compatibility with the HUGE Speccy back catalog was a misstep almost of QL levels of stupid! Had that been in place ...well who knows?

Same here, the TS-1000 was the first computer I ever owned. If it hadn't been for that computer, I may not be where I am today in the IT field!

yep, great machine to start. I did the same, adding a full keyboard, expanding the memory, and printer. I even modified the video signal to use a monitor instead of the TV. Frankly, the reason for jumping ship was the printer even though for some of my surveying programs I wrote, the output was good enough to transfer the numbers into the notebook for field work. Definitely not a failure, shouldn’t be on this list.

Me too. It was the first computer I ever had, in May 1982. Sure, it was limited, but what fun it was. In fact, I still have it, in its original box. Never use it but it is a part of my history.

The ZX-81 and the ZX-80 before it, started a revolution. Not a failure by a long shot. It got computers into the hands of so many people. It started my career in IT and still sits in my office 20 years after I retired. P.S. It still works!

Compared to the Apple II (A2) and Commodore 64 (C64) the TS-1000 was a dismal failure. Still, as you point out, 600,000 units sold isn't too bad.

Was about to say the same thing. It really wasn’t the media that was expensive, it was the players. There were many movie titles where the VHS prices were higher than LD.

This whole video is a train wreck of misinformation. It comes off like it was made by someone who wasn't yet alive when these products came out did some "research" by reading a few ad articles produced by competitors - kinda like Pepsi "bragging" about how New Coke was a "failure", but not acknowledging the fact that Coca Cola used the switch to New Coke, then back to "Classic Coke" to cover the recipe alteration they needed to make: switching from cane sugar to corn syrup. People would have noticed that overnight, but few people noticed when Coca Cola reintroduced Classic Coke 6 months later. This video's errors: 1. Steve Jobs didn't see the GUI in a "dream", he saw it at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where it was created, along with the mouse. Bill Gates saw it there at the same time, and both Gates and Jobs thought that was the direction computers would go, but Xerox had so little faith in their "toy" that they released the patents to the public and let anyone use and copy them without licensing them. 2. The Kodak Disc Camera was never intended to compete with 35mm cameras. That's absurd - Kodak made it in hopes to financially recover from their massive financial loss with the Kodak Kodamatic, which was a copy of the Polaroid Instamatic camera, and Kodak had to pay Polaroid almost $1 billion, plus buy back hundreds of thousands of cameras from consumers. The Kodak Disc camera was designed to compete with the then-popular 110 format camera, but in a smaller format that was easier to carry in a pocket, and ride the popularity of media discs at the time. Kodak introduced it in 1982, 3-4 years after their lawsuit with Polaroid began. Kodak was able to draw the lawsuit out for over 10 years, but it cost them more in the long run. They could have settled for $250 million in 1984, but dragged it on until 1990, at which point the settlement was $925 million, plus staggering legal fees, and of course the cost of buying back all those now-useless Kodamatic cameras. 3. The Seiko TV Watch was never meant to be a consumer item. They used a tiny LCD screen (NOT a "cathode ray tube", aka CRT). Seiko didn't expect the popularity of the watch, and began making them in very limited quantity, and they sold for $250 to $800 back in 1982-83 ($800 to $2,600 today, give or take a bit), and they were very hard to watch. The screen had all of 32,000 pixels, and reception was difficult with the built-in antenna. It became hugely popular after the James Bond movie because the movie faked a color picture on it, but that didn't matter - Seiko didn't make enough of them for average people to ever see one up close. By most estimates, they made fewer than 1,000 of them. 4. The TS 1000 was hugely popular, and had the ability to use a larger keyboard. As others have mentioned, it got many people involved in computers simply because it used BASIC and could be had for $100. Most computers at the time started around $1,000, and quickly went up much higher than that. 5. As also mentioned, the DiscoVision wasn't a flop. Not only did they stick around as consumer items until the early 2000s, they were also used as a common method of delivering movies to movie theaters for about 25 years. And the Coleco Adam also wasn't a "flop" - it got a lot of people to buy Coleco computers and game consoles, and vice versa. It was one of the few home computers at the time (and one of the first) to embed a gaming system into a personal computer, and it's kinda of hard to imagine a computer today that doesn't follow that lead.

I used the Adam word processor all through high school to type out reports; that thing impressed my teachers to no end, though they would've been less impressed if they heard how incredibly LOUD that printer was (I used to drop a pillow on top of it to muffle the machinegun sounds it made). As for Laserdisc: I don't believe something that was manufactured for 23 years would fit any definition of "flop." Back in college I worked at an electronics store that sold them. We moved quite a few, but even with a generous employee discount I could never afford one, they were crazy expensive. In fact, I finally got my first player in... 2023, about a month ago! Watched the original, unmodified Star Wars on it last week. I've picked up a handful of the big Disney box sets (Pinocchio, Fantasia , etc.) as they tended to come with posters, prints, hardcover books, that sort of thing. Laserdisc definitely isn't a hobby for everyone... It's totally archaic and totally inconvenient, but I'm having a blast with it. Cheers!

@@Mike-ie5xu LaserDisc was also used in several popular arcade games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Buckaroo Banzai and some others.

I thought Philipps developed Laserdisk?

The original Sony Watchman had a comparatively tiny 2" monochrome CRT. I doubt you could make one much smaller and the required depth is a limiting factor.

@@jnharton You need depth for a CRT deflection yoke to work.

you on yo SHIT!!

A fellow GLUTTON for punishment with them "Klassic Komputers". Yes, the TS-1000 had that almost unusable membrane keyboard, its immediate successor, one can at least more readily type in programs and other input, though for anything other than a short, one-page document, it's not a "word processor". I have it and the TS-2068, AND the QL. It was a shame the 2068 didn't do well, but, like so many decent products, a victim of bad timing and its maker/marketer having neither the desire nor the resources to "tough out" the rather dicey home computer market of 1983 to about mid-1985.

You think those chicklet keyboards were bad - did you ever try an Atari 400 with its membrane keyboard. I actually got use to it after a while thanks to taking typing class in high school.

Actually, in late 1982 and early 1983, when the Adam was being rushed through development, most HOME computers, which the Adam was, did NOT have even floppy disks. The popular Commodore VIC-20s almost universally used either cartridges or that 1530 "Datasette" (proprietary cassette recorder), because the old, clunky Commodore 1541 disk drives retailed for almost $500! The ADAM's "digital data pack" was THEORETICALLY a cost-effective solution, being in effect a "stringy floppy", much like the Sinclair "micro drives" that found greater acceptance with that UK computer maker's Spectrum and QL machines, offering data transfer speed that compared favorably with the floppy drives of the time...IF they worked. Which too often, they did NOT. As you pointed out, the user had to remove the "DDP" to avoid it getting accidentally erased, a HUGE design flaw. There were actually a few Adams pushed out in 1985, before Coleco bailed on the venture, that had a single 5-1/4" floppy drive, but by then, the brand had lost all credibility. And yes, the power supply being integrated with the daisy-wheel printer, which was obsoleted by the introduction of relatively inexpensive "NLQ" printers, was another annoying design flaw.

The Coleco Adam Data Packs being taken out was normal back then as you didn't want the tape drives to jerk the tape when it spun up the gears as it powered on. The surge was just an extra risk because must people didn't have their printer set down the length of the power cable to side but had right beside the tape drives. I still remember when I had saved up and got the expansion for 2nd tape or Digital Data Pack Drive. I thought I was the king having two data packs of programs and memories available for all my needs. No switching from your program cassette to the flank one you saved data on, you just kept the program data pack in for accessing information and saved and loaded off that 2nd drive.

I was one of the unfortunate few who had an Adam computer system. It was the all-in-one system, not the expansion pack you added onto a standard Colecovision gaming system. It came with a pack-in cassette based game called Buck Rogers, and when the drive worked, the graphics were way better than if the game was played on a standard cartridge drive. However, the cassette drive was the first thing to go south. I would put a tape in, and it would spontaneously rewind and fast forward without loading the game. Turns out 5 out of every 6 units shipped to stores were faulty, and they only sold 100K units in its first year when they expected to sell 500K units. This system eventually sunk the Coleco company as we knew it.

@@72seasonsofwither Sounds like you didn't respect the corruptible nature of data cassettes, I mean "Digital Data Packs". Leaving them in the drive or beside the printer would corrupt them and then the drive would spin the tape forward and backwards looking for the data that was not there or corrupted. That wasn't the fault of the ADAM computer or the storage media but end users not understanding how fragile data was. that these were not you normal car cassettes that you could use abuse in your Boom Box. There were not 5 out of every 6 with bad drives ether.... That would have been an instant recall, There were some faults but for price the DAM was reliable and good computer. It open the door to many ad held share in competitive market that was coming in to a hard crash. The timing of launch was bad. I had one and added a second tape drive to run both programs and my file storage and thought I was hot stuff with that much memory space, sadly the modems came out way too late ad BBS were drawing people into computers and the ADAM didn't have one and when they did it wasn't as cheap, so their customer base was less willing to pay computer part prices for regular retail. The Buck Rodgers game was great, I also figured out bug to eject and you could play the same level over and over to run up your score, them close the door and the game would then load the next harder levels. The ADAM was well packaged and priced computer that came out right as the market was failing, had to compete against computers with established names and more important software libraries. Which the same program on different computers were not able to open their save files on another computer. The different operating systems were that different back then. You had ATARI Computers which were Respected, then you had all the Tandy Computers from Radio Shack well respected and because of Radio Shack had better ability to get into the home of new users. IBM computers were the big elephant in the room and Apple computers was also making a good name for itself. Coleco was knowing for gaming consoles, and despite making better package, the people(the dumb masses) chose Commodore Computer over it due to it having more programs and parts (disk drives, modems) , this is just like public choose "VHS over the far superior Beta Max," same thing to "HIGH Def DVD and BLU RAY", The Laser discs never caught on and they were larg CD/DVD copies of films that were far supior to the tape formats...... The public chooses what survives it always isn't the better of the two options. The ADAM was Computer that came with printer keyboard and 2 controllers (the closest thing to a "mouse" at the time for gaming). Did they make mistake making the power supply in the printer, yes but they had to cut costs and separate power supply in the printer help keep the magnetic field from the start up surge farther away from circuits and DATA DRIVES. those Tapes held more than diskettes at the time. Which was selling point. People would put their floppy disk on the fridge with magnetic, not knowing better. Today that seems laughable but back then, the understanding by people was far far less, which we're turning back into. How many modern kids know what to protect a floppy disk or data cassette "Digital Data Pack from?

Ah Peek and poke - the high level assembly language keywords. Back when we knew what we were actually doing.

We got one when it went on clearance at Sears. I did learn how to do programming on it which helped me later in life.

The Model T put American and the rest of the WORLD on wheels like no automobile had before or SINCE. It was the right product for its time.

I'd much rather compare the 1908 Ford Model T to a 1944 model North American Mustang! A lot faster, better range, and six .50 caliber machine guns is STILL a LOT better than a 2023 Ford Mustang!

Before the Timex Sinclair / ZX81, there was the ZX80. I still have an advert for it somewhere, the casing of the ZX80 being white and blue in colour. THAT was futuristic.

I had a Sinclair ZX spectrum 48K and in the day it was great! The old games like Knight Lore, Sabrewulf, Starstrike and the like were amazing at the time! Now we can have more than 10 cores, 20 threads running at 5GHz and the RTX 3090 as an example operating in the teraflop range producing near photo realistic graphics is just mind blowing.

Yes, Sinclair did quite well with the ZX81 and the first few offerings of the "Speccy" (16K, 48K, and Plus). But price competition from Amstrad and Commodore ate into Sinclair's profitability, and the intended "next step", the QL, was a "ghastly flop". Hence why Sir Clive was forced to sell out to Amstrad. Did not he and Amstrad's founder once get into a fight at a pub?

@@selfdoLegend has it he had a 'fight' in a pub with the founder of Acorn, Chris Curry, a former employee of Sinclair, over a newspaper ad slagging off Sinclair's reliability issues. Sinclair nearly went bust because Sir Clive put most of the profits from the successful Spectrum into his passion project, the C5 electric car (actually an electric recumbent trike) which was about 30 years ahead of its time, but completely impractical in the 1980s. He subsequently sold Sinclair Research to Alan Sugar's Amstrad who created the +2 and +3 Spectrums and continued to sell them into the 1990s alongside Amstrad's own CPC computers.

Absolutely agree. I attempted to say something similar but you said it best.

Just out of curiosity, can you remember what the retail price was on those? Given the NES was about £100,- in the late 80s (Perhaps equivalent to £450,- today) I'd just love to work out what those come to when adjusted for inflation! 😇

And it is more likely that you have those old photos. Most of us have no idea where our thousands of digital images are or in which device.

I loved my disc camera, too. It was small and easy to use. Picture quality was questionable, though.

Got one for mom but she lost it 🤷🏻‍♂️. It was okay, but her old 110 camera was a lot better.

I got a disc camera and found an underwater housing right before my big scuba adventure to the Cayman Islands. The pictures were fine until I tried to get some enlarged to try to bring out some details.

I'm also from Rochester, New York and had a disc camera. I thought the photos looked fine! The only disadvantage I remember was having only 12 photos before you had to change the disc.

Certainly be a darn good exercise regime having something like _that_ hanging off your wrist all day! A 1,2" CRT would be at least an inch deep, and I'd estimate at least 1lb (226g) including the coils! 😀 Mind you: A pair of fresh AA batteries might get you _just about_ enough viewing time to watch a newscast on something like that... 🙃

I did wonder...

I would totally rock a CRT watch.

Plus it recorded and played on both sides of the tape, that and Beta were better quality than VHS but kept too much in house restricting the range of manufacturing.

Yes, the Colecovision/ADAM games were rather close to "arcade" quality for a fairly inexpensive home computer. It was the CV that forced Atari to finally put out a successor to its long-successful 2600 console, the 5200 (which flopped), and the 7800 (which did, meh, it made a little money...), before the Trameil family bought the struggling company from Warner Communications, which was bleeding red ink with Atari. The Trameils re-styled the Atari 8-bit line and pushed on with the ST line, which was a credible competitor to the Apple Mac, so much that it was dubbed the "Jackintosh", but more or less abandoned the dedicated gaming platform, redoing the 8-bit XE into a dedicated system, but otherwise simply another home computer. Atari's Lynx would be a huge success as a handheld in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but meanwhile, its ST/TT lines were floundering in the USA, thanks to consumer preference for cheap Taiwanese and Korean PC clones. They did ok in Europe, especially Germany, but Atari finally threw in the towel on its ST/TT/Mega line in 1993, to focus on the 64-bit Jaguar console. It's market failure, only 150K units sold, was Atari's end.

Somehow Nintedo's technical inferior Gameboy squashed the Lynx and other portable games with color displays. Nintendo had a track record of winning with old gear. The NES and SNES were each revamps of Japan market consoles that had been available for two years before Nintendo took them international. I was surprised to see a 1983 copyright date the first time I opened an NES, which wasn't made until 1985. Later I learned the Famicom was released in Japan in 1983. Nintendo made bank selling the world obsolete technology when they were about to introduce their next console exclusively for Japan.

@@greggv8 The Lynx and Game Gear went through batteries like nothing and were also more fragile than the Game Boy which was built almost like a mini tank. Those advantages outweighed the color screens of the other portable consoles.

Coleco and Mattel both got bogged down in the home computer market which they should have stayed far away from. Neither company had in their video game staff the people they needed to engineer and design a good computer. Neither the Colecovision nor Intellivision had the CPU power and other hardware and data bus connections needed to integrate with the additional RAM and peripherals to put together a decent computer. Coleco at least had the same video processor as the TI-99/4A. The ADAM was better than what Mattel finally slapped together as a "computer addon" to get the SEC off their back so they could shut down Mattel Electronics. The Intellivision was less capable of having a computer upgrade as an expansion. A small number of units were made where the game console served mainly as an interface for the game controllers. It was far too complex to be made at the price point required to meet their sales goals. The greatly reduced capability thing they settled on sold poorly but satisfied the Securities and Exchange Commission to be a "computer add on". Absent those misadventures which ate massive amounts of money to develop, those two companies might have gone on to make second generations of their consoles. Or Nintendo and Sega could have blown them away like they did NEC and anyone else still in home video games after 1985. Imagine Xbox and Playstation and Saturn coming into a market with Nintendo, Sega, Coleco, and Mattel.

I had one of those disc cameras. The quality wasn't all that good.

Yes. Yes it is!🤔😏

I do own some early MCA Discovision titles they were prone to laser rot. Apparently there were bonus videos of the dead side of these discs.

Many people started programming on Sinclair computers. They had pretty decent capabillities for the price and tons of software. Who would ever think it was a failure?

I still got my tv walkman and it still works

Not in the UK or Europe, they didn't. The USA was another matter. The TS-1000 sold well, but being intended to introduce folks to computing who hadn't already bought one, it had a limited market and profitability. Timex was counting on Sinclair's follow-on Spectrum color computer to be the big money-maker, but they badly handled the USA version of it, the TS-2068, and bowed out of the home computer market only about seven months after its introduction.

@@selfdo Hmm, I didn't know the USA existed until I had to go there once to get to Australia🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣

@@LungsMcGee Also when the T/S 1000(which was a repackaged ZX81) came out it was already entering a market where the Apple II, Commodore PET, Commodore VIC-20, TRS-80 Color Computer, and the Atari 400 and 800 were already established. Later that same year the Commodore 64 came out. So by the time the the Timex Sinclair 2068(US version of the ZX Spectrum) came out... It just couldn't compete with the vastly better competition. Especially since Americans were more cash flush at the time. So the Commodore 64 at nearly $600 was seen as affordable. Which just destroyed the market Timex wanted capitalize on.

@@natsume-hime2473 Interesting, obviously my early experience was in the British market.

Why should they? They’re kids NOW.

Yes, the Spectrum came out a bit later, and it had the newfangled color graphics.

The Timex Sinclair was basically the Sinclair ZX-81 microcomputer (which itself was an improvement over the earlier Sinclair ZX-80) -- most notable as being the first microcomputer to be priced at *under* US$100. To achieve the low price however meant some sacrifices had been made (only B/W, no sound, membrane keyboard, only 1K RAM, etc). As far as specifications went, it was underwhelming compared to its contemporaries. The 1K RAM was barely enough for only simple programs to be run, so the 16K RAM expansion was almost a must. Unfortunately the connection for the RAM expansion was one of its weak points (it would easily work loose -- and when that happened, the computer would crash).

@@nuk1964 One of the advantages of the TS 1000 was it had twice as much RAM as the ZX-81. And yes, that port was problematic, not only did the memory connect to it but so did the printer, and yes, the computer would crash if the RAM pack... connected after the printer, came lose.

@@JeffDeWitt The TRS-80 Model 1 had similar problem. A short stiff ribbon connector used to connect the base unit (the keyboard) with the expansion interface unit -- if you moved the keyboard unit around you ran the risk of knocking that cable loose and crash the system. The heavier weight of the TRS-80 did make it a wee less likely you'd move it accidentally than the ZX-81 and TS-1000.

I guess Commodores were too sucessful to make this list. I had a VIC20, then a C64. One friend had an Adam, just like the one in the video, and another had a ZX81. I preferred my Commodores to both, but between the Adam and the ZX81, the Sinclair had a huge advantage due to price. A lot of retro-computing enthusiast still love the various Sinclair computers, I've not seen an Adam since the mid 80s though.

DOOM is what ultimately killed off the Amiga, because it just didn't have the muscle to run that game. Mostly that's Commodore's fault for not keeping up with the times. Still the Apple II was actually in a lot of ways a lot more advanced than the Commodore 64. The expansions slots in the Apple II could make it even better than the C64 in every way. To the point that the Apple IIe was just flat better out of the box. The problem was that the Apple II was $1,300 when the Commodore 64 launched for just under $600. For the price that made the Commodore 64 the better option. The IBM PC might not have had the graphics or sound, but they could carry up to 640k of ram for the original IBM 5150 and its clones. Which made those vastly superior business machines. On top of the fact that both the 8086 and 8088 they ran were 16-bit CPUs. Unlike the dominant 8-bit MOS 6502 that the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, and Commodore 64 had. Also before you say it... Yes the C64 ran the 6510, but that was just a 6502 with a different pin-out configuration.

I think the risk of accidentally erasing a tape left in the drive at startup was probably a bigger issue.

@@jnharton And they were way too UNRELIABLE.

@@selfdo Okay? I'm just saying that reliably is kinda moot if they can get accidentally wiped clean in a perfectly ordinary situation like that. --- You'd never have had those kinds of problems with a decent tape recorder and the choice of any number of cassette tape manufacturers (back then).

@@jnharton It wasn't the tape deck's fault. The Coleco Adam had a massive electromagnetic surge on start up, Which is what garbled tapes beyond recognition.

That's pretty awesome!