In 1981, I first got interested in computers and tried to get my children's Atari Video Game to make some entries on our TV screen.  I had a good friend, who at that time, was building computers at home.  When he saw what I was doing, he told me there was a computer company in England, called Sinclair, Ltd., who was designing a small computer called the Sinclair ZX80 and they were trying to market it through one of his computer trade magazines.  He told me if I was interested in computers this Sinclair Computer was a good start to see if I liked computers.  I took one of the ads from his computer trade magazine and ordered it from England.  The one they were trying to market at that time was the Sinclair ZX81.  It cost me $99.00, plus shipping.  It had only 2k of RAM memory.  So this was a real start in getting into computers.

Within the next year, Sinclair, Ltd., sold their ZX81 Computer rights to Timex and it was marketed in the U.S. as Timex/Sinclair 1000. At this point, the Timex/Sinclair grew in popularity in the United States. In July, 1983, the Timex/Sinclair 1500 was released with a slightly different look.  Within a few months they released a Timex/Sinclair 2068, which was much larger and had more memory and was in color.  At this point, I purchased the Timex/Sinclair 2068 and was well on my way becoming involved in computers.

The $199.99 Timex Sinclair 2068 was the fourth and final Sinclair-designed machine marketed in the USA. Released in late 1983, it didn't meet sales forecasts and was quickly discontinued. Part of the problem was that the machine wasn't 100% compatible with the incredibly popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum (sold as the Timex Sinclair 2048 in the US).

The TS 2068 was an extended version of the popular British ZX Spectrum. In addition to a 3.5 MHz Zilog Z80 processor and larger 48K RAM & 24K ROM, the engineers added a General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip (later included in the ZX Spectrum+ 128K, although with imcompatible addressing), dual joystick ports, and an awkwardly sized cartridge port to the right of the keyboard for quick loading ROM programs and games (this made lots of sense in the early 1980s world of cassette-based storage). There were also a couple of additional video modes and some additional BASIC language commands. Great on paper, but not so great when your favorite Speccy game didn't run.

I needed to make a step forward so I changed to another computer which was becoming popular at the time and I purchased a Kaypro.

       The Kaypro was a new venture and was more like a computer and it used the CP/M operating system, which was popular at that time.  I purchased the Kaypro 2X and began to get use to the new operating system.  I, with several others, organized a Kaypro Users Group and I was elected president of the group.  But there was something that was missing with the Kaypro 2X system.  The CP/M operating system was on its way out, so I purchased a Kaypro DOS machine which used the DOS operating system, which was used on all IBM compatible machines.  Now I was really in the computer business.  All I had to do was to learn the DOS system.