Intel 8008-powered Q1 PC has 16KB of memory, 800 kHz CPU
The discovery was made by house-clearing waste firm Just Clear, based in London.
Photography of the Q1 PC on display at Kingston University. (Image credit: Kingston University via The Mirror)London, UK-based waste firm Just Clear was living up to its name and just clearing another house when tucked under some random boxes, they found two of the first desktop microcomputers ever made: the Q1 PC, from Q1 Corporation, released in 1972 (h/t The Mirror). Fortunately, this piece of computing history was not scrapped, and Just Clear kept its hands on the old units long enough to determine their actual historical value.
If you want to see these for yourself and are based in the UK, move quickly! They are now on display at Kingston University in Surrey, England, but only for the rest of February 17th. Afterward, it's expected both will be either auctioned or sold to a private buyer, so you won't get many chances to see these artifacts in the flesh.
As far as what to expect, don't expect too much— these are the first desktop PCs created with a fully integrated single-chip microprocessor, including the CPU. They use the Intel 8008 CPU, an 8-bit CPU capable of processing a whopping sixteen kilobytes of memory while reaching a maximum clock speed of eight hundred kilohertz! Typing out those numbers (16KB, 800 kHz) doesn't make them any more impressive by modern standards, but in a pre-PC era like the 70s, that 16KB might as well have been 16GB.
An interesting aside history lesson is attached to the Q1 PC, though, particularly if you look at the Q1 Corporation that developed it. The Q1 Corporation was acquired in 1974, just two years after releasing its Q1 PC boasting Intel's 8008 CPU design. Intel's 8008 CPU was initially intended for Computer Terminal Corporation's DataPoint 2200, but Intel was late turning around the CPU.
Thus, Intel's intended DataPoint 2200 CPU became the 8008 CPU, and CTC used their oPU for the DataPoint 2200, which was released in 1971— and a desktop PC using a multi-chip microprocessor, not single-chip like the Q1 or modern desktop designs. Of course, we eventually scaled up CPUs to use multiple onboard cores, but that was not until the 2000s— another thirty years after our Q1 PC here and its other early desktop brethren.
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