I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and previous work experience designing test equipment for Aerospace Electro-Explosive Devices and Inertial Navigation equipment. I also designed microprocessor-base fire alarm systems for high-rise buildings, at a company ironically then located, on the 91st floor for the north World Trade Center tower.

In 1983 I got so enthusiastic about the Times/Sinclair TS1000 that I quit a job as plant manager of a manufacturing company, and started Zebra Systems, Inc. to design, manufacture, and market products for the Timex/Sinclair market in the United States.

In those early years of my company I designed a keyboard-beeper, joystick adapter, A/D converter, and a speech-synthesizer for the TS1000, TS1500, and TS2068. I marketed by taking out advertisements in various Timex/Sinclair oriented magazines. It was a small company, and at it's peak, I had six employees: I was the hardware designer, manager/president, and chief cook and bottle washer. We had a computer programmer; two production people who assembled, soldered and tested product; and one general assistant. Nearly everyone pitched in with customer service duties, shipping clerk, etc.

I visited fall computer shows in London, England two years in a row looking for products to import, visited Memotech once, and visited the Timex factory in Portugal twice. I even imported a small quantity of floppy disk controllers and drives from Timex for the TS2068 computer.

Sinclair briefly had distribution in the United States, and I bought ZX81 kits from them which I sold to technical schools, generally in quantities of 30 to 500 at a time. Some of the schools would have students build the ZX81 kits in the classroom under an instructor's supervision, where they would go over soldering skills, parts identification, and computer theory. Other schools told me they gave the kits out to students to build at home, and they were principally interested in the students learning the importance of following instructions. Eventually, the kits stopped being available from Sinclair so I stopped selling them, even though the schools still wanted them.

When Texas Instruments started dumping their TI99 personal computer, other manufacturers shortly folded their personal computer efforts, including Timex. I learned about purchasing closeouts from discontinued product lines and purchased Timex/Sinclair books by the pallet from publishers, and lots of Timex software at clearance prices. I continued to support Timex/Sinclair computers long after Timex stopped supporting them, while I transitioned my company to supporting other personal computers from Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack.

After some time, I was offered a lot of around 2,000 more ZX81 kits at a good price, that had been in some warehouse. I took them figuring I could sell them to the schools I had previously sold kits to. I turned out to be wrong. The schools had been forced to find other projects to build when I ran out of kits, and now they didn't want to temporarily switch back, just until I ran out of kits again.

I put the kits in a garage and sat on them. In fact, as the Timex/Sinclair support magazines all died out, I had no cost effective way to sell these kits to anyone. Personal computers got more sophisticated and I changed my business to doing computer consulting and network support. I became a Novel CNE, taught Netware courses and then Microsoft Window NT courses at New York University part-time.

Sometime after the Internet got popular I happened to search on the keyword ZX81 and was amazed to find the user groups and websites supporting Timex/Sinclair computers. So I built a small website and started selling kits to individuals. More recently, ebay was created, and every once in a while, I put a kit up for sale on ebay. I now also sell kits in moderate quantities to a reseller in England.

The kits aren't moving very fast though, because I havn't made much of an effort to market my website. I still have probably somewhere between 500 and 1000 of them. I just looked on google.com today and I wasn't anywhere near the top 10 when you search on the keyword "ZX81". I am starting to work on that now. My ZX81s are around 20 years old now, and it's time to get those kits into the hands of the Timex/Sinclair enthusiasts, who appreciate the little marvel.

Thanks for reading this, and please tell your friends, that as amazing as it seems, I have original ZX81 kits to sell now in the year 2003. Links from any website to the Zebra Systems website would also of course be very much appreciated.

Long Live the ZX81!