Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

In the early 1980's I was a TI-99/4a and later on a C-64 owner. I had friends that owned Timex Sinclair 1000's. We used to lament the shortcomings of each machine and do our best to talk each other into getting what we had. I am a recent buyer of a TS 1000 from fleabay. The price wasn't too bad and the board works but only half of the keys respond. Now that replacement keyboards are available, this machine has the chance to live! In all of the machines that I've owned over the years, I have never used a tape recorder to load or save a program. I bought one of those too.

As a side note, around 20 years ago i found 2 TS 1000's at a thrift shop near Seattle for $2 each. The keyboard connector ribbons were snapped in half at the middle of the loop. Since there was no tech support or other help available, they wound up in the trash. I have always wondered if there was a way to repair those ribbon cables and why a company would use that weak design.

Hello and welcome to our forum RDuckey!



I hope you enjoy the forum

Sinclair’s objective was to manufacture the cheapest practical home computer. Hence the minimum number of chips (four or five depending on which RAM chips were the cheapest available at the time) and the membrane keyboard. These were some of the earliest types of membrane keyboards and hence the long term life of them were not known.

Also it may not have been known at the time, that the heat from the circuitry contributed to the plastic of the membrane going brittle.

It’s never been practical to repair the membrane tails. Apart from cutting off the bad section and then trying to get the clean cut section into the connector (or another connector mounted on wires rather than on the PCB).

Thankfully RWAP Software in arranging for new keyboard membranes to be manufactured, has helped bring countless machines back from the dead

Good luck

Mark