Newsletters & documentation
User-group newsletters and periodicals — SYNC, Time Designs, SINCUS, scanning/OCR, magazine archives.
191 threads · 1568 messages · 2002-05-13 → 2026-06-10
Preserving the user-group newsletter trail has been a continuous project across both eras of this list, but the scale and tooling shifted dramatically. The Yahoo-era groundwork came from David Solly ('Zabad'), who in 2008 announced he had scanned his Timex/Sinclair newsletter hoard to PDF and was both giving the originals away and mailing CD-ROMs of the scans to anyone who would host them. That same era's read-the-newsletter-then-rebuild-the-hardware pattern also showed up in 2015, when Al Hartman went after a Zebra OS-64 cartridge on eBay specifically to harvest its design so Mark could lay out a reusable board for OS-64, Spectrum-emulator and 2068-cartridge re-creations.
The groups.io era turned that one-person effort into a steady pipeline. David Anderson has been scanning and uploading whole runs to archive.org — OHTSUG, ISTUG, SMUG Bytes, The Plotter, Time Designs, SyncWare News, CATS, Nite-Times News, TS Horizons, ZXzine, The Data Expansion (Fort Worth/Dallas) — usually OCR'd, and frequently with the contributor still on the list to comment on their own old articles. Two landmark donations anchor the recent work. The first is Jack Boatwright's repeated boxes of newsletters, books, ROMs and disks (including issues of the Long Island Sinclair/Timex newsletter with 'Dr. Watson' ROM routine documents that fed directly into David's 2068 ROM disassembly book). The second is Lon Hildreth lending the boxed-up internal-Timex documents in October 2023 — Bank Switching Controller Chip Functional Specification, Application Development Library, Draft Microdrive/LAN/TS2060 specs, TS2065 / TS2070 (the planned Microdrive cartridge name) — which the group treats as primary-source material rather than reminiscence. David personally guaranteed return and declined offers to ship them around for scanning.
The newsletters aren't just archived — they get used. Carol Corcoran's first 64-column listing was identified as the precursor to the OS-64 cartridge (and the Portuguese 'basic 64'); Ryan Gray then built an OS-64 memory map showing the custom COPY print driver and FDDRS232 driver loading into display-file attribute space, exactly where the dual-display-file scheme reserved room. Tim Swenson's QL Core War from CATS v6n12 (1989) was rediscovered and then re-implemented in Sinclair BASIC by Eduardo Fuentes with a Redcode-94 update. Richard Booth's 1985 'Applied Sinclair' tape was lost, so Jeff Burrell zmakebas-converted the main listing for Adam to plot Demonstration 2.4. Hugo Pinto from the LOAD ZX Museum surfaced through the New-Timex-Documents thread to announce the TENET cataloguing project. Adam Trionfo's biographical digs — 'Who is Bob Swoger?' (Chicago Area TUG, Nite-Times News editor, Gator's Twisted Pair columnist, BBS author who wrote his own without ever having seen one, SNUG co-founder; his family wrote in December 2020 to announce his passing) and the New Mexico Timex companies trail out of a SyncWare News pointer — are essentially newsletter-driven oral history.
A throughline worth noting is that the group has also been documenting how the old newsletters were made. Chris Nystrom describes building column-printing and split-page-taping features into his TE2000 text editor specifically so the Abilene TX group could push a full-page newsletter through a 2040 thermal printer; that same TE2000 work later got picked up by the Dallas/Ft. Worth group, where the Data Expansion newsletter ran with Mike Hart and Ryan Gray briefly involved (David found Mike's entry while indexing). Willie Jones's BBS, central to ISTUG's earliest newsletters, was recovered and uploaded as software in parallel. So newsletters serve three roles at once — they're the artifact being preserved, the source code (literally) for current type-ins and hardware rebuilds, and the record of how the community used to talk to itself before this list existed.
Key threads
- Old newsletters to give away (archive.org) — Yahoo-era root of the preservation effort: David Solly (Zabad) scans his Timex/Sinclair newsletter hoard to PDF in 2008, gives originals away, and mails CD-ROMs to anyone who'll host them — the first wave that the current archive.org work builds on.
- New Timex documents uploaded / 64 Column Mode Support (#4481 on groups.io) — Bank Switching Controller Chip Spec, Application Development Library, Draft Microdrive/LAN/TS2060 docs — all uploaded in one push. Becomes the thread where Carol Corcoran's original 64-column listing is identified as the OS-64 precursor and Ryan Gray works out the OS-64 memory map from display-file attribute space.
- You must see this (#4465 on groups.io) — Lon Hildreth (Timex programmer) loans David a box of internal-Timex documents — TS2060, TS2065 microdrives, the planned TS2070 microdrive cartridge name. David personally guarantees return rather than ship them around for scanning.
- Even more newsletters, featuring Willie Jones! (#1654 on groups.io) — ISTUG newsletters with Willie's central role — and the thread drifts into a Timex Digitizer hardware project where Willie reverse-engineers the schematic and routes a board, the canonical 'newsletter article → rebuilt hardware' workflow.
- New books and newsletter uploaded to archive.org (#87 on groups.io) — David's June 2021 OHTSUG upload paired with his Color Graphics and TS 2068 Explored book uploads — the start of the regular archive.org cadence that has run ever since.
- Bill Miller Collection (#4564 on groups.io) — 169-message thread covering disposition of Bill Miller's collection, including Carl's TS1500 conversion recipe (16K RAM, switching regulator, paint scheme) and Tim Swenson's first-hand 'what I know about Bill' history — newsletter material flowing in via estate transfer.
- Who is Bob Swoger? (#2197 on groups.io) — David's detailed history of Bob Swoger (Chicago Area TUG, Nite-Times News editor, Gator's Twisted Pair column, BBS author, SNUG co-founder) with 14 URLs Adam printed and saved — closes with Bob's wife Annette announcing his December 2020 passing. The clearest example of newsletter-driven oral history on the list.
- Why people stuck with their Timex computers for so long (#8924 on groups.io) — January 2026 thread where David's work indexing Computer Shopper articles reframes the affordability/lock-in story — and Chris Nystrom describes building 80-column split-page printing into TE2000 specifically for the Abilene group's newsletter.
- Spectrum and Times Christmas Demos (#5237 on groups.io) — Newsletter-as-source-for-type-ins: David's contribution is Jack Armstrong's December 1985 program from The Plotter, archived and runnable. Closes with Ryan and Adam comparing CRT vs LCD renderings of attribute-cell color blending.
- Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays (#5336 on groups.io) — Holiday thread that becomes the launching pad for Tim Swenson's 21-page 'History of the Timex Computer Corporation' — a born-digital community history written from the newsletter archive.
All threads (191)
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