Two employees of Just Clear, a Kingston-based British house cleaning company, were moving boxes stacked in one of the rooms of a property in England when they came across two old computers. They were a kind of archaic keyboard, different from the futuristic designs of today’s computers.
“Each year, our cleaning crews collect thousands of computers from homes and businesses across the country. From time to time, we come across items that are deemed important enough to preserve and archive for the future,” explains Brendan O’Shea, Founder of Just Clear.
O’Shea contacted an expert. But he didn’t look for an archaeologist to interpret a relic from the distant past. He called Paul Neve, leader of Kingston University’s computer science program. That’s when they realized that what they had in their hands were two Q1 microcomputers, considered the precursors of modern desktop computers.
These two models were last used by an oil drilling company in the 1970s and were then abandoned to their fate. The devices now found were the world’s first fully integrated computers powered by a single-chip microprocessor. Only the existence of a third is known, which would be somewhere in Scandinavia.
The Q1, manufactured by the American Q1 Corporation in December 1972, was an industrial computer that looked like an orange and black typewriter with a distinctive plasma screen. Its development marked an important milestone in the development of computing. Previous models were equipped with multi-chip microprocessors, but this machine was the first to be powered by a single chip, the Intel 8008.
This microprocessor was launched on the market between March and April 1972. It was an 8-bit CPU with a calculation capacity that could reach 80,000 instructions per second. In addition to being used in some of the first personal computers, the 8008 was also common in calculators, robots, and factory equipment.
“There would be no PC, no Mac, no Apple or Android phones without Q1 Corporation, Sinclair and Acorn,” says Paul Neve in a statement. “The early pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for today’s ‘do-it-all’ device: the modern computer, which is so ubiquitous in everyday life,” he adds.
Considered the first true microcomputer, the Q1 was the first to be produced commercially and only a few examples were imported into Britain. Experts believe that these newly found could be the only surviving models in the country.
“We depend on computers for our work, communication, productivity and entertainment, but without the early pioneers none of this would exist,” says Neve. The Kingston professor organized a temporary exhibition this past weekend in which he displayed several devices that are key to the history of computing, including the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro.
The exhibition, titled ‘Creating the Device of Everything: Showcasing the Machines That Built the Future’, featured more than 60 computers from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, all predecessors of today’s modern technology. After passing through the university’s showcases, the two Q1s will now likely be auctioned unless a museum or collector seeks to purchase them privately.
More than 60 different terminals and gaming machines were on display at the exhibition, some of the first generation, including the Atari, Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Sinclair QL, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Amstrad, Commodore and the Dragon 32.
Some were still operational and visitors were able to enjoy classic computer games, many of which turned the companies that developed them into current console powerhouses, such as Activision and Rare.
