“One man’s trash” is… a rare $60,000 historic computer

According to Smithsonian Magazine, a salvage company in London was cleaning out a property and found a strange-looking computer. No one knew what it was, and they couldn’t find anything with a quick online search. The two devices in question were extremely rare Computers Q1 It dates back to the early 1970s.

Although these devices looked enormous, they had Intel 8008 CPUs but had built-in monitors, keyboards, and printers. The two machines were little known at Kingston University in London, and are now up for sale. They will likely fetch around $60,000 each. Not bad for salvage scrap.

Ironically, the $60,000 price tag is less than the original cost of $90,000. The article notes that several Q1s have been employed at NASA sites across the United States. There are also reports of it being sold in Europe and Asia. It wasn’t clear if the newer device is one of the Q1 devices that uses the Zilog Z80 instead of the 8008 or if both devices use the original Q1 CPU.

If you haven’t heard about Q1, you haven’t been reading Hackaday, but you can watch the video below. Sure, this is a Z80 machine, but you can take a peek inside. The 8008 got a bad reputation, but for that time period, it was certainly high-tech.