World’s first desktop PC randomly discovered during house clearance
World’s first desktop PC randomly discovered during house clearance
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World’s first desktop PC randomly discovered during house clearance
15 comments
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I wonder if there is a video or anything somewhere showing one of these in use? Or in general more information, sounds like an interesting piece of history.
Searching for Q1 microchip computer or Q1 personal computer etc. didn't yield anything.
Edit: Found one directly on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZCW9paOjs, and another video which looks to contain some more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB3V_Q9wQ-M
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I wanted to know what OS powered them. Probably a custom one by the manufacturer? Which I can imagine I could find with a bit of web searching but I'm too lazy for that.
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I did the research and it's a bit interesting. It was known was GMOS (General Motors Operating System) made for IBM devices. Yes, THE General Motors that makes cars like Buicks.
I'm oversimplifying, but if DOS was Windows Command line, GMOS would be like a Linux equivalent. It's all input/output and maybe executing a very specific program like a calculator.
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Not really. If DOS was Windows command line, this would be more like executing a series of jobs from the bootloader and waiting for output or errors to appear on the terminal or printer.
The only thing something like GMOS would have controlled is hardware resources and I/O. The "very specific program like a calculator" is accurate, but is loaded into memory via tape or punch cards or the like by the operator at runtime, alongside whatever other software was needed for the job batch.
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The default question wasn't made, so I'll make it:
"but it does run Doom?"
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that looks like a cyberdeck
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I bet I could get Tetris Attack on that thing.
15 comments
That does sound rather ominous. The world's first in something should have a lot of information on it on the intertubes. It's old, it's nice,but the first?
It looks like a flat screen and not like crt, unless it is using some lights and a mask to display fixed characters.
Rather compact
Edit: first desktop computer featuring a single chip as a CPU
https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html?m=1
That's not a graphic display. This is what it looks like in operation:
It's basically a dot-matrix, apparently using some form of plasma? From a closer look at the grid
I think it might be like a Nixie matrix like this one:
But older, less refined.
That red dot display reminds me of something I saw in the late 70s but can't recall what. Was it commonly used on other devices?
Looking at it, I think it might be an one of those old mono LCD displays? The video makes it look like it's a bunch of small individual ones rather than a large continuous display.
Holy shit... it's a large dot matrix plasma display. Haven't seen one of those in ages.
https://hackaday.io/project/179986-plasma-display-mc6205
That project has pictures that show you how they looked/worked.