TSU Meeting MONDAY — March 6, 2023

David Anderson, George Grimm, Adam Trionfo, Carl Miles, Tim Swenson, Gustavo, Bruno

This meeting was a guest interview with George Grimm, the software manager at the Timex Computer Corporation in the early 1980s — the person whose name appeared on the last page of the Third-Party Software Programmer's Guide as the contact for software submissions. George walked the group through the birth of the Timex Sinclair line from his vantage point: getting handed an unbranded ZX81 by Fred Olsen and asked to make it work, pushing it to 2K of RAM for CES Chicago, writing the very first Timex titles himself (Budgeteer, States & Capitals), and shipping out of the Torrington warehouse while RAM packs literally fell off the back of every machine (he wedged them on with #2 pencil erasers).

A large part of the conversation was the cottage industry of software submissions: Sue Currier and SoftSync funneling Spectrum titles up to Timex, an open-door policy where authors could walk into the Connecticut lobby unannounced, a 7% royalty paid across roughly 900,000 tapes, and a small in-house review team (notably Rod, who became Sue Currier's right hand). George singled out Sandy White's Ant Attack and a Death Cycle 2000 / Moonbreaker-style demo as the two programs that showed his team what the machine could really do — including the "write between the interrupts" trick. He recounted writing Grimm's Ferry Trails himself by poking Z80 byte-by-byte through the POKE key, learning assembler from Bob Beeler, and naming the characters (Murph, Drago, Prince Billy, the Beelers) after the team.

The 2068 story was largely a story of delay and burn-rate. Adding joysticks and a cartridge port meant rewriting the ROM from scratch, which Timex had no in-house capability for; the mask-ROM runs in Arizona kept failing, each failure cost a month, and TCC had no revenue while it waited. Then a fire in the Indiglo lab next door melted George's entire software library — Zilog development system and all. Funding ran out (a rumored Dunkin' Donuts investment fell through), and on the Monday all 107 staff were let go George never actually saw a fully working joystick-and-cartridge 2068 demo in the lab. The group filled in pieces he didn't know — that an in-store kiosk demo ROM for the TS1000 has now been reverse-engineered and is being reproduced, that the States & Capitals cartridge had to be patched to delay the RNG seed (because the cartridge always started at the same frame count), and that the TS1000 ended up driving everything from NHRA drag-race data recorders to Art Colgate's three-axis milling machine and Carrier HVAC controllers.

George also gave the group the missing piece on a long-standing mystery: the recommended Timex cassette deck was a stock Radio Shack Minisette (silver; some painted black for photos), which he discovered by walking into the Radio Shack a mile from TCC headquarters and bought 20,000 of after Billy Skirm told him to clean the store out. He confirmed Billy Skirm as the real technical engine of TCC, that Nigel Searle (not Clive Sinclair, whom he met only once) was his main UK contact, and that Victor Schiff was his first hardware tech before going on to Microsoft. He pointed the group at further interview leads: Carlos (hardware/sourcing), Margo Murphy (early marketing), and Lou Galie (engineering VP, already reached by Bruno).

Highlights

Guest: George Grimm, former software manager at Timex Computer Corporation, who handled all third-party software submissions for the TS line.
Origin of the recommended Timex cassette deck confirmed: a stock Radio Shack Minisette bought 20,000 at a time from the store a mile from TCC HQ.
2068 launch was crippled by repeated mask-ROM failures at the Arizona fab and then by a lab fire (started by the Indiglo group next door) that destroyed Timex's entire software library and Zilog dev system.
George wrote Grimm's Ferry Trails himself by hand-poking Z80 machine code via the POKE key, learning assembler from Bob Beeler — characters named after the TCC team.
Interview leads surfaced for future meetings: Margo Murphy (early marketing), Carlos (hardware sourcing), Lou Galie (engineering VP, already contacted by Bruno).

Topics: TS2068 / TC2068 · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Tape, cassette & loading · Cartridges, EPROM & dumping · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · BASIC programming

Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.