Q1 employees

I happened to find a thread with comments from some Q1 employees. This is copied from internet archive of old-computers.com

So far I have not been in contact with any of these people.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230205172525/https://old-computers.com/museum/forum.asp?c=1286&st=1

Bob Frazier

My first job in technology. Worked there from early 80s to nearly the end in 1989. Started in the Test department, did Field Service, and in the end did a little bit of everything. We went from around 500 employees to me, the receptionist, and the president (Glen Malm). Moved from Hauppauge, to Coram, to Medford, and after I left I think it moved to Glen’’s garage.

Donald P. Sellari

I worked at Q1 from 1979 to 1982 as a systems programmer. Most of the utilities were written in PL1. The compiler and linker by Rick Smetts were brilliant. I implemented fomatting/conversion of 8” IBM diskettes, 5 1/4” diskettes, and CP/M on the Z80 Q1 Lite.

Mark Bellon

WOW! I still have some of the manuals! They include the pseudo ops for the PL/1 interpreter (removed from later manuals as this gave away things). Let’’s see I remember Hope, Sandy, Coleen/Doreen (twins, forget which one worked there), and John… amongst others. A sales person Charles (Castelli?). I came up with a paired set of Q1 Lite by replacing some of the ROMs and using a sync. modem. This allowed remote access. DTERM, the terminal program was mine too. Karl provided some of the base code, written is assembler. I did a simple Real Time Executive (RTE) that allowed two program to run “at the same time”… provided memory was allocated just so (no memory protection). Many of the utilities were written in the PL/1 dialect although once we have C, we wrote some in that too. For many decades my computer desk was an old Q1 desk, from an LMC. The frame has room for up to 4 8” floppies. It’’s long gone now… I remember after Rick had left he was called back in as a consultant to fix a complex issue with ENTER, the word processor. Another memory, playing with the bubble memory machine. As I recall multiple 92 KiB modules. John was in the MGM Grand fire but survived without a scratch. As I recall all Q1 personnel made it out OK.

Mark Bellon

Hey Donald, Karl, Bob! Hey Rick!

I worked @ Q1 too, 1978 and on. I did lots of work on the utilities (e.g. sort, serial communication), worked with the early C compiler (Donald, as I recall you did a lot on it), math libraries and other items.

Rick Smets

Some problems with the first attempt at posting so I’’ll try again. I wrote the operating system, the PL1 compiler, the word processing application and designed the floppy disk controller. Later, I designed a server for networking many Q1 computers while working for an affiliate in England. Read about it on homepage URL. I included the sex scandals.

David Kavanaugh

I had worked for them as well. It was my first job in microprocessor programming. I remember fixing a defect in their text editor that caused a $ of records for high volume disk packs. I also developed a code debugger where none existed before so I could fix the issue. Used it later for other areas.

Joe Prevete

Also an employee from 1980-82…my first job out of college as a tech writer…I do miss those 8-inch floppy days…jprev.

Karl Wacker

I worked for 6+ years at Q1.

The 8008 system had an intigrated keyboard/ single line 80 charater plasma display and daisy wheel printer as a console, and 2 hard sectored floppy drives.

I came on board just as the 8080 system was introduced $Q1/LMC$ it had in the console a keyboard, a 6 line 37 char plasma display and daisy wheel printer, and up to 4 floppy drives $8” single density, variable sector length from 8 - 511 bytes/sector$, 6K ROM, 8K - 48K RAM, custom operating system, and used a version oif PL/1, which could complile oand execute on a base system $8K RAM, single floppy$.

The next generation was the Q1/LITE, Z80 based, 8K ROM, 16 - 48K RAM, 8 line plasma display,up to 4 double density 8” floppies, could share floppies or up to 2 27Meg Hard Drives over a 4-64 user network running at 307Kbaud, up to 1000’’ between the server and a station. Varations included dual mini floppies with 8” dot matrix printer $MICRO-LITE$, diskless work stations for the network $keyboard and display only$, Mag tape, 300LPM line printer, Bubble memory $the bubble memory unit and the netowrked Hard Drive system was instaled in many NASA sites. The last versions included both 24x80 Plasma and CRT displays. $I designed the hardware and software for the network, hard drive, mag tape, line printer, 24x80 CRT $ Plasma displays, dot matrix printer and other interfaces including a custom interface for a visualy impared NASA data entry operator, that allowed him to ‘’read’’ the display and act as a voice ouput device instead of a printer$

They produced a 68000 based system as I was leaving them.