Two Nearly 50 Year Old Desktop PCs Discovered During House Clearance

At some point you get tired of all the mess in the attic or basement and decide that you should probably go clean it up. This often leads you to the discovery of some old photos, old DVDs or even an old games console or PC which gives you about an hour of of “It still works!” nostalgia induced gaming before inevitably tossing it back into a pile never to be seen again. Well today was one of those situations albeit with a much more important piece of computing history discovered during a house cleaning.

Two of The Worlds First PCs Discovered During House Clearing

As reported by The Mirror, two of the worlds first desktop computers were discovered during a home clearance in London by a waste firm Just Clear. At the time the company had no idea what they had found but had cleverly deduced that it was important taking the two PCs to a computer expert. The two PC’s in question was The Q1, the worlds first fully integrated desktop computer powered by a single-chip microprocessor.

This computer was a major step forward in computing history and was made by the Q1 corporation in the USA with only a few models brought to the UK making this an incredibly rare find, especially two of them. In a statement to the Mirror, Just Clear’s boss Brendan O’Shea said: “Our teams find all sorts of things while clearing houses on a daily basis, some with historical significance, but never did I imagine that we’d find something so important to the field of technology and the history of computing.”

The PC’s were placed on display at Kingston University at an exhibition up until yesterday (Feb 17th) when they will be either placed on auction or sold privately.