Almost All Gone:
The last of my Sinclair ZX81 Kits and Alphacom 32 Printers
January 2022

I graduated from Rutgers with a degree in Electrical Engineering and had four different jobs before 1983 when, at the age of 36, I started my own company, Zebra Systems, Inc., to serve the Timex Sinclair hobby computer market.  I ran Zebra as a mail-order company advertising in hobby computer magazines, out of a Woodhaven NY storefront with 4 employees until 1988.   I purchase a lot of books, software, and other Timex Sinclair products at closeout prices and supported Timex Sinclair users long after Timex and Sinclair stopped making computers in 1984.

In 1988 I purchased about 3200 Sinclair ZX81 Computers in kit form -- that meant unassembled parts, that hobbyists had to solder together for themselves.  When I got the kits, the technical schools I previously sold them to no longer wanted to buy them from me, having switched to teaching with other kits.  In fact, without the Timex hobby computer magazines, I was not able to start selling these kits for some years until the Internet became popular and I was able to sell a few on my website. Thankfully, ebay was invented, and I started selling kits on ebay in 1998 where I have been selling them ever since.

Those 3200 kits came to me in large cardboard boxes about three feet long on each side and 33 kits per box. I remember picking them up from an Air-Freight terminal at JFK airport in the largest truck that I could rent without having a commercial drivers license and driving them out to a storage park where I rented two 10' x 20' garage spaces and filled them top to bottom with these kits. Some years ago, I reduced this to a single garage space, and last week, I opened the last box of kits and removed them so that I could stop paying rent on the storage space. 

I have been very lucky with these kits. The Internet got invented, ebay got invented, and most importantly, the interest in Timex Sinclair computers has continued and the these computers in kit form are now valued as collectables.  Sir Clive Sinclair, the creator of the ZX81 Computer, passed away this past September 16th, and was celebrated in the press. There is even a kickstarter, to fund a documentary movie called the "RUBBER-KEYED WONDER - 40 Years of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum" about Sinclair's much more famous computer, the ZX Spectrum.

Below is a video of me opening my last case of Sinclair ZX81 computers and preparing to move out of my rented storage space.

Video of my last case of Unassembled ZX81 Computer Kits and last 2 cases of Alphacom 32 printers.