House cleaners find two of the world's first desktop PCs in random boxes — Intel 8008-powered Q1 PC has 16KB of memory, 800 kHz CPU

Photography of the Q1 PC on display at Kingston University.
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.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • repeating13
    Admin said:
    Two of the Q1 PC, which is the first-ever desktop PC made with a single-chip microprocessor, were found during routine waste clearing in London.

    House cleaners find two of the world's first desktop PCs in random boxes — Intel 8008-powered Q1 PC has 16KB of memory, 800 MHz CPU : Read more
    My eyes about popped out of my head reading 800 MEGAHERTZ in the title.

    I remember installing a Pentium Overdrive processor as an upgrade in probably 1996, and that CPU was running 266Mhz.
    Reply
  • COLGeek
    repeating13 said:
    My eyes about popped out of my head reading 800 MEGAHERTZ in the title.

    I remember installing a Pentium Overdrive processor as an upgrade in probably 1996, and that CPU was running 266Mhz.
    Corrected. Thanks.

    For additional information:
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8008
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    It is also odd to think that at the same time multi-chip processors were operating in megahertz (the Apollo 11 guidance computer was 1mhz), so I wonder how many discussions centered around "Single chip processors will never be faster than multi-chip processors".

    And somewhat ironically, 50 years later, multi-chip designs are proving that true again.
    Reply
  • askyron
    In 1968 our computer club was given access to Olivetti programable desktop calculators. We were told they were called desktop calculators because it required a vice president level approval to purchase computers, but desk top calculators were much easier to approve. These were programmable in BASIC so, I guess the question is, what was a desktop PC?
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    repeating13 said:
    My eyes about popped out of my head reading 800 MEGAHERTZ in the title.

    I remember installing a Pentium Overdrive processor as an upgrade in probably 1996, and that CPU was running 266Mhz.
    No listen, do not believe your lying memory, those 66 Mhz state of the art PCs of the early 90s were also lies.
    Reply
  • oliverzip
    The earlier Datapoint boxes had Intel 4004 in them. My mum used to program them and set up a business around them in the late 70s. They had a Lan and all. Why wasn't that the first PC?
    Reply
  • Aleax23805
    Sleepy_Hollowed said:
    No listen, do not believe your lying memory, those 66 Mhz state of the art PCs of the early 90s were also lies.
    True. His memory is *way* off about the Pentium Overdrive CPUs. There were two versions - 63 and 83MHz, for 25MHz and 33MHz bus 486 systems respectively. 266MHz didn't happen until the Pentium II processor, around 1997.

    The 1990s saw clock frequencies explode like no other decade. At the beginning of 1990, the fastest CPU was a 25MHz 486DX. By the (very) end of 1999 we had 800MHz Pentium !!! Coppermine (yes, I stylized it the way intel did back in the day, LOL) processors - clock rates went up by a multiple of 32 in 10 years. I recall I was CONSTANTLY upgrading in the mid 90's, myself.
    Reply
  • jmcgaw
    I can relate even though I've never heard of these computers. I built a 8008 computer back in the day (RGS008) and thought it the most amazing thing imaginable at least until I built a 8080 system that got the clock up to 2mHz and carried 16mB of memory (IIRC).
    Reply
  • greenreaper
    askyron said:
    ... it required a vice president level approval to purchase computers, but desk top calculators were much easier to approve. These were programmable in BASIC so, I guess the question is, what was a desktop PC?
    Plot twist: 'PC' actually refers to Personal Calculator.
    Reply
  • MyXPC
    Thanks God were the affordable Z80 processors.
    Reply