Charles C. Humphrey

Starting in 1981

 

 

 

THE BEGINNING

       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.  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.