The world’s oldest microcomputer is younger than me.
That’s if I believe a public relations story that was doing the rounds last week, anyway. A house-clearance business called Just Clear had been doing what it does – emptying homes of unwanted junk and salvaging items that could be sold through auction – and discovered not one but two Q1 micros. They were subsequently put on display as part of a short-run exhibition of vintage computers at Kingston University mid-February.
It’s big news for tech historians because the Q1 was the first desktop computer incorporating an Intel 8008 processor to reach the commercial market, in December 1972. The Q1 was built by Q1 Corporation in New York – no doubt having spent many sleepless nights coming up with a catchy name for the product – and not many were shipped to the UK. Previously, only one Q1 was thought to be in the country; Just Clear’s discovery tripled the number.
Here are those freshly found Q1s:
Despite the early 1970s colour styling – not so much ‘stone white’ as ‘tobacco stain’ – there is something extremely appealing about it. I can imagine early adopters warming their hands on a cold evening over the orange plasma display as they typed up business documents that they would not be able to print or share with anybody since no-one else in 1972 got a micro for Christmas. And you can pretty much guarantee that chunky keyboard beats the pants off any modern flat equivalent.
While not may Q1s reached Britain there remain plenty in museums and private collections in their homeland. Nerds might like to read about some of those that survived the last 51 years here and here.
One of the great things about those pre-IBM PC micros is that they looked quite different from each other. Love or hate the compact bakelite look of a Q1, we must acknowledge that each manufacturer was forced to hire some people to invent some kind of sturdy box in which to corral all the ugly electronics. The only design guide they had was electric typewriters, which of course didn’t have screens – not even one-line displays, because LCD was still a laboratory concept at the time.
As soon as PCs went modular, it was as if everyone gave up bothering about how they looked, leaving all that stylistic crap for the early laptop manufacturers to worry about. By the mid-1980s, every desktop PC was a literal clone of another desktop PC, both inside and out. By the late 1980s, the defenestration of Steve Jobs from Apple had meant that even Macs were made to look super-dull like PCs, externally at least.
I remember this because my first computer was a Mac Quadra 650, purchased as soon as I jumped off the ship of wage slavery in 1993 for the wild seas of freelancing.
In those days, you needed a Mac if you worked in design and publishing because that’s what the software ran on. Admittedly, Macs of that era came with bugger-all beyond the raw basics of System 7. Me, I “borrowed” a copy of Microsoft Word (as everyone did back then – did anyone actually buy their copy?), begged a copy of Adobe Illustrator 88, and installed an old but legit copy of QuarkXPress 3, complete with its original authentication floppy that you had to insert every time you launched the program.
The Quadra 650 had the appearance of a boring PC – even more so since mine didn’t have a CD drive – but it ran like the clappers.
I say this by way of comparison to my first actual PC, an Intel 486SX running at 16MHz with an entire gigabyte of memory, which I purchased from Tiny Computers that summer. I needed a Windows computer, you see. And while Tiny was a lovely direct-sales company with really helpful people you could actually speak to on the phone, the PC I bought from it was dire.
For all I know, it might actually have been a half-decent machine… if it hadn’t been hobbled by bloatware. Up to that point, my experience of PCs had been that of stark boxes in the workplace with just a couple of apps on each; and of course my Mac which was so lacking in frills that you’d think it had been packaged by Methodists.
But this Tiny PC’s poor little hard disk was stuffed to bursting with heaps of pre-installed, useless shit. Most of the crap was from Corel, which was hugely disappointing. I’d previously been a fan of CorelDraw but wasn’t prepared for the mountains of cack that the latest version had smeared across my modest hard disk. There was even a truly awful “integrated” (i.e. packaged with yet more unnecessary software turdery) word processor whose name I can no longer remember – Ami Pro? SmartSuite? – not to mention 52 trillion pieces of childishly bad clipart.
This left me with so little free hard disk space, virtual memory would churn constantly; it would continue to do so even for a minute after I shut down. I hated this computer. When it reached the point of being completely unusable a mere 18 months later, I was overjoyed at the thought of not having to keeping trying use it any more.
Bloatware is not a thing of the past, mind. Even if you avoid those manufacturers which subsidise their prices by pre-installing dozens of trial apps onto every new laptop, the bloat these days is in the system itself. Operating systems and everyday net access make use of impossibly complex implementation of cross-referencing library files for even the simplest of tasks.
I was reading this article in IEEE Spectum the other week by PowerDNS founder Bert Hubert about the problem, and he reckons bloatware is at the root of all security breaches. He writes:
“A typical app today is built on Electron JS, a framework that incorporates both Chromium (“Chrome”) and Node.JS, which provides access to tens of thousands of software packages for JavaScript. I estimate just using Electron JS entails at least 50 million lines of code if you include dependencies. Perhaps more. The app meanwhile likely pulls in hundreds or thousands of helper packages. Many packages used will also, by default, snitch on your users to advertisers and other data brokers. Dependencies pull in further dependencies, and exactly what gets included in the build can change on a daily basis, and no one really knows.”
How many lines of code does it take to turn on a lightbulb?
I imagine the Q1 was rather lean by comparison. Oh, and on that topic, I should bring my story rapidly to a close by saying that I went on to buy a nice-enough replacement for the Tiny PC from another direct seller: Evesham Micros. They were a bit odd on the phone when I placed the order because of my surname: they thought I was calling from their competitor Dabs Computers and taking the piss.
I replaced this PC two years later with one from… Dabs Computers. Disappointingly, nobody there thought my name was worthy of comment. It was OK but barely limped over the Y2K finishing line intact. Meanwhile the Mac Quadra 650 kept me going through the Millennium and I only replaced it – with a third-gen Power Mac G4s – in 2002. So maybe not so much like a PC after all.
The funny thing is that I avoided laptops for years, preferring palmtop computers which were the in-thing before smartphones. My absolute favourite of all time was the Psion 3a. It was unique, it was as tough as boots, and it just did what it was supposed to do without fucking about.
If you squint, you may spot a passing resemblance to the physical format of the Q1, but in every other way there has been nothing quite akin to a Psion 3a before or since, not even the Series 5.
It wasn’t just a copy of a copy of a copy.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He promises to stop reminiscing of past failures in computer purchases like an old git and will return to slagging off modern products and people, like an old git, next week. Normal service will be resumed.
A gigabyte of RAM or HDD on your 486SX/16 ?
That's a very short list! Surely not comprehensive?