Now here’s a rare item. Search ebay for something like a Sinclair Spectrum and you’ll find hundreds of the things, many of them labelled by their sellers as (somehow unspecified) rare. But try Timex 2068, which is a Sinclair Spectrum in a posh frock, and, unless you’re luckier than I was, you’ll get a big fat ZERO hits. Even searching ebay.com (as opposed to .co.uk) produced ZILCH.

I came by this one when we were recruited by Timex to work on some “business” packages for a “new” computer they were developing for sale in education markets in Brazil. Actually the recruiting was a bit second-hand as the main application contractor was Hisoft, sadly now defunct, and, as we used Hisoft Pascal compilers to develop our Sinclair programs, and as business programs for Sinclairs were a bit thin on the ground we sort of got roped in.

Anyway, as part of the development program they gave me this thing to work with. It’s basically a bog standard Spectrum in a jazzed up case with a port for an EPROM cartridge tacked on at one end.

On taking it out of the box for the first time there were two immediate problems to solve. First the power supply unit was a USA wall wart thing designed to run off 110 volts. This, on inspection, appeared to kick out 12 volts DC as opposed to a Spectrum unit’s 9volts. The Spectrum one wouldn’t work so I ended up press ganging a power supply from a Scalextric set. Bear in mind these were the days when you couldn’t just pick up a multi-voltage DC power supply from your local hardware shop.

The second problem was the output for the video display unit. It was “de rigeur” in the early eighties for home computers to output RF signals suitable for plugging straight into a domestic telly. The results were of variable quality and rarely brilliant. The best you could say was that it was cheap. But our Timex had a “proper” composite video output – and nothing else. Fortunately I had a composite video monitor left over from some half arsed business computer that I’d bought cheaply from my last real employer. Thank goodness it wasn’t a USA NTSC TV port – that really would have been unreadable. I’m told that NTSC stands for Never Twice The Same Color.

The software conversion was not too complex – basically it involved going through the user display screens and substituting Portuguese for English which worked well enough on the simple database and spreadsheet programs. The word processor, it transpired, required more. Portuguese, it turned out to my chagrin, needed accented characters as well as the regular 26 we know and love. And there were rules about the use of these (which I forget now) which meant a whole pile of extra programming. Fun but no extra money.

Anyway, towards the end of the project I had to fly out with David Link of Hisoft to Lisbon where Timex were co-ordinating the production of this computer for sale in Brazil. There was some more hectic last minute programming as more rules about accents crawled out of the woodwork and, after four days of burning the midnight oil, no time for sight-seeing L , we emerged, knackered, into the arrivals hall at Heathrow. Which would have been great except for one thing. We’d left from Gatwick !

Bad weather, fog I think, had closed Gatwick and we’d been diverted. So after a long journey we had to find a way back there to pick up the car. Who said this job was easy ?