Two of the world's first desktop computers have been discovered during a house clearance. The Q1, which was launched in 1972, changed the way we use computers today.

These two models, which are among only three known surviving examples worldwide, were found hidden under boxes during a house clearance in London by waste firm Just Clear. The staff at Just Clear, who aim to salvage and reuse as many items as possible, didn't know what they had stumbled upon but decided to set them aside until they could find out more.

Follow up to this Post: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/8771226

As promised yesterday, here is a look inside the machine! Before it also had spiders and spider webs inside but I cleaned those out!

Beside the dust, one very interesting thing I've found inside on the board are 2 seemingly modded chips with labels on them! The left one read "Ex Basic 2 | Sockel: Mitte | UD4" (Sockel: Mitte is german for Socket: Middle) And the right one just says "Ex Basic | Re 1"

On the back of the machine there is another Ex Basic related Label that says "Ex Basic=sys37100" I wonder what this is all about.

Gonna take an electric Bike pump and see if its powerful enough to get rid of the dust on Saturday, then its time to boot her up for the first proper time!

Follow up to this Post: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/8651436

I finally got it! Though I couldn't test the CBM then and there, as its way too dusty under the hood. Didnt wanna risk shorting the electrics or worse. I'll show just how dusty it all is tomorrow.

Talking of Dusty insides, the insides in general are rather interesting actually. It has From what I can tell, some ancient modifications done to it which im not sure what they do. But thats for tomorrow! Im just glad that I got to pick it up today, and I even got this pretty cute pic while I was at it!

I greatly enjoyed "So now that we're done moving the goalposts, we can start porting Unix to the Famicom Disc System" and "the kernel is running trust me".

I've finally taken the jump into retrocomputing with something I've always wanted to own, a proper Commodore PET, or CBM 3016 to be exact!

The seller said 5 years ago when it was last turned on, that it worked perfectly fine. However I do wanna take some precautions before reawakening it. Not that something blows after all this time.

I however am still pretty new to retrocomputing and wanted to ask the experts on here, If/what I should first inspect under or over the hood before turning it on? Thanks in advance!

Two of the titans of 8-bit computing in one board.

For when you need something to test video playback on your old windows 95/98/XP friend (files and instructions in description).

Up to the 1990s there were workstations designed for software development (Lisp/Smalltalk Machines by various vendors), graphics and CAD (Apollo, SGI), and general purpose systems (Sun, HP).

Was Xerox Star the only office workstation?

Were there other dedicated workstations (not high-end PCs or Macs) designed for office and business tasks? Of course there were word processing machines. But I'm not sure they qualify as they didn't play in the same league as the Star and were much less versatile.

They keep this 20+ year old laptop around because it has a serial port and every now and then that comes in handy.

You can't really see it in the picture but the laptop is pretty thick and heavy.

Were there any 8-bit era computers that had a 3.5" floppy? They probably would have run CP/M. I do have an apple IIC+, but I also would like some sort of Z80 machine.

This should boot up on your run of the mill S-100 based system with an 8086. Maybe an 8080 too? Also, it reportedly runs under #simH as a virtual machine. According to some, this is the earliest known version of #86-DOS, not long after replacing #QDOS as its successor.

Anyway, download it and give it a try!

"IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up."

• Tim Paterson

#tallship #DOS #Retrocomputing #SCP

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