Made in Portugal: Timex of Caparica

Timex, the American watch brand, had a factory in the municipality of Almada, in Caparica, where in the 1970s thousands of women worked, mostly assembling watches ^[3]. In the early 1980s, Sinclair Research made an agreement with the Timex Corporation to mass-produce its computers, and Timex had two factories in Europe: one in Scotland and the other in Portugal ^[2].

The change was fast. According to PÚBLICO, in seven months the Portuguese factory went from a modest subsidiary to a thousand workers ^[1]. Production figures vary with the source: PÚBLICO wrote in 2006 that more than 10,000 computers a day were made there at its peak ^[1], and a 2014 article speaks of more than two thousand units a day ^[2]. Former workers remember it as one of the best places to work at the time, with young people earning more than their parents, and the factory also worked for IBM and Minolta ^[3].

Many of Portugal's "Spectrums" were, in fact, Timex machines made in Caparica.

There were two product lines made in Portugal: Timex Sinclair, for overseas markets, and Timex Computer, for Europe. The models inspired by Sinclair's prototypes were four, the 1000, the 1500, the 2048 and the 2068, with around ten peripherals ^[2]. The idea was to sell under its own brand where Sinclair was not present: the USA, then Poland and Chile, with talks for China and Brazil that came to nothing ^[2]. There were also exports to Spain, England and Argentina ^[3].

The factory had its own engineering ^[3]. After Timex left the American market, the Portuguese team took the TS2068 and, with INESC, made a new version of the SCLD chip compatible with PAL and NTSC televisions, lowered the power supply to 9 V and changed the expansion connector to the Spectrum format. That is how the TC2068 was born, in silver and in black; the black one was exported to Poland and also sold in Portugal, with an RS-232 interface and the Timeword word-processing cartridge ^[5]. The FDD 3000 disk systems came next ^[3].

The best-known model is the TC2048. A Retro Review article sums up what happened in Portugal: in the 1980s the market was full of Spectrums, almost everyone with a computer had one, but many of those "Spectrums" were in fact Timex Computer 2048s ^[4]. For the ordinary buyer it was a better Spectrum: a plastic keyboard mounted on a circuit board, much tougher than the Sinclair membrane, a built-in Kempston joystick port, composite video output, a power switch and a power light. Shops sold it as the natural alternative to the ZX ^[4].

It had professional uses too: connected to the FDD 3000, with its own Z80 and an extra 64 KB, the TC2048 ran CP/M, the most widely used office system of the time ^[4]. Timex Portugal's computer division closed in the early 1990s ^[2]. The story was told in 2025 in the documentary "TIMEX, Uma Revolução por Contar", by Galgo Filmes for RTP 2, narrated by João Diogo Ramos, of the LOAD ZX Spectrum museum in Cantanhede ^[3].