I never knew those came as a kit! I remember my dad considering one of these (already built) but it was branded “Timex Sinclair.” They were $100, which I had saved up. Instead, we took my $100 and his $200, and bought a Model I TRS-80 from my cousin. This was in 1982, so by then the thing was already 3 or 4 years old. We paid a (presumable) Tandy employee, moonlighting out of his garage, another $100 to add Level 2 BASIC (jumping from 4KB to 16KB RAM) and lowercase letters. But he got something backwards, and we had to press “SHIFT” to get lowercase. I still have the working Model I but I don’t have a functional cassette player (i.e. “tape drive”).
But come to think of it, we got an Atari 2600 a month or two before the TRS-80.
ETA:
Came back to say that, on second thought, the first video game in our house was “TV PIXX,” but view-only, because we were never contestants.
I only knew one other person who had one. He got a dot-matrix printer for it, and it used 4" rolls of paper, kind of like really wide cash register (or adding machine) tape.
Same here – I upgraded from the TRS-80 to the C64 in 1987, when my (other) cousin got rid of his (in favor of an Amiga). I never knew what some of those games looked like in color. Mostly I played games on it but I did write my junior theme on it (in a spreadsheet).
