xNote: The Q1 Corporation was founded by Daniel Alroy in New York, USA.
Daniel was a true computing pioneer and visionary.
He wrote a fascinating retrospective a few years before he passed away, explaining the rationale of the company and what they were attempting to achieve in those early days.
The company exported machines to Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
The Q1 corporation attracted a team of highly innovative and skilled computer science engineers, who took the unusual step of porting IBM's mainframe compiler, PL/1 (Programming Language One) to a microcomputer, instead of using a BASIC interpreter.
One of the core engineers worked in Hong Kong and was instrumental in porting PL/1 from the mainframe environment.
It was a quality machine, with clients including NASA and the National Enterprise Board (NEC) in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Q1 worked with several partners, buying in commodity hard and floppy drives and printers, and rebadging them as their own. A popular option was an NEC spin writer thimble printer, which produced letter-quality text.
Q1 insisted on their own black and orange branding as part of its distinctive industrial design.
My Q1 file server - built like a tank and containing both a 10Mb hard drive and floppy disc - contained a high-quality 8-inch drive, 1.2Mb formatted DSDD.
Some earlier models of the Q1 lite contained smaller twin full-height lower capacity 5.25" drives.
Q1 restoration projects:
Work is now been undertaken by a small band of enthusiasts to reverse engineer the Q1 workstation, and some code has been written to read and decode the Q1 format disc image.
https://github.com/MattisLind/q1decode
The ROS manual described the record format in some detail.
A number of ROM images have been successfully decoded, and it is hoped that disc and ROM images will be archived and available for download, for research purposes.
It is hoped that some of the early software (compilers and business applications) can be restored, alongside the CP/M operating system that ran on the later Q1 microlite model.
