The T/S 1000's casing had slightly more internal shielding but remained the same as Sinclair's, including the membrane keyboard, which had modified nomenclature to suit American tastes (e.g. "DELETE" instead of "RUBOUT") Just like the ZX81, the T/S 1000 had black-and-white graphics and no sound.

It was followed in 1983 by an improved version, the Timex Sinclair 1500 (or T/S 1500) which incorporated the 16 KB RAM expansion and featured a lower price (US$80).

However, the T/S 1500 did not achieve market success, given that by this time the marketplace was dominated by Commodore, Radio Shack, Atari and Apple.

Timex claimed to have sold 600,000 T/S 1000s in the US by early 1983,[2] and other companies imported localized versions of British software.

The limited graphics were based on geometric shapes contained within the operating system's non-ASCII character set.

A shortage of the memory expansion modules coupled with a lack of software that would run within 2 KB meant that the system had little use for anything other than as an introduction to programming.

These tutorials provided an opportunity to learn about early speech synthesis technology through a Speak & Spell, robotics control through the memory port, and scrolling text displays for advertising.

Over time, the T/S 1000 spawned a cottage industry of third-party add-ons designed to help remedy its limitations and provide more functions.

Full-size keyboards, speech synthesizers, sound generators, disk drives, and memory expansions (up to 64 KB) were a few of the options available.

The design utilized the T/S 2000 prototype (ZX Spectrum-like) silver cases that weren't previously used because of the launch of the T/S 2068.