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Two Q1 personal computer , wide consider to be thefirst single - microchip PC , have been discover by house clearers in the U.K. The discovery brings the entire number of known surviving units to three in the world .
Employees from the house - clear up society Just Clear establish the two Q1s buried under several boxes while clearing out a property on Dec. 18 , Just Clear ’s laminitis Brendan O’Shea narrate Live Science in an email . These two model were last used by an oil drilling ship’s company in the seventies , and the other known example ’s location is thought to be somewhere in Scandinavia , O’Shea tot .
The Q1 microcomputer is often viewed as the precursor to the modern desktop computer
Just clean employees ab initio had no theme what they had found . O’Shea then look up with an expert , who told him these gimmick were the world ’s first amply integrated desktop computers powered by a individual - buffalo chip microprocessor .
The Q1 , made by the American Q1 Corporation in 1972 , was an industrial computer with an orangish and black-market pattern and a plasm display , and it ’s viewed as the precursor to the modern desktop computer .
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(Image credit: Just Clear)
It marked a meaning milepost in the development of computer science . Computers before the Q1 were fitted with multi - chip microprocessors — but this machine was the first to be design and power by a single chip , the Intel 8008 .
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(Image credit: Just Clear)
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" There would be no PCs , no Macs , no Apple or Android phones without the Q1 Corporation,“Paul Neve , professor of computing at Kingston University in the U.K. , said in a statement . " The early pioneer in the 1970s and eighties laid the foundation garment for today ’s ' everything ' machine — the mod computer , which is so ubiquitous in workaday living . "
The couplet of computers were displayed temporarily in an exhibition at Kingston University telephone " create the Everything gadget : Showcasing the machines that build the future " , alongside several other devices that are cardinal to thehistory of computing , including the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro . The two Q1s may now be auction off unless a museum or collector seeks to corrupt them in private .
(Image credit: Just Clear)
(Image credit: Just Clear)
