I had one of these interesting systems, which I believe came from the National Enterprise Board (NEB) in the UK. Mine was a Q1 Microlite (manufactured between 1978 and 1980), with an 80 character x 8 character high quality, sharp orange gas plasma display. The Q1 range had excellent keyboards and distinctive orange gas plasma screens, housed in futuristic black and orange boxes. The branding extended to the file servers and printers. They were examples of pioneering industrial design, and quality workmanship. One strange quirk was that the workstation was very polite, displaying the message "Welcome to the Q1 microlite", and "Q1/Microlite at your service". Some thought and care had gone into the design and presentation of this quality computer. I was very fortunate to have a high specification file server, with a 10 Mb (7.29 mb formatted) four platter 8" hard drive, and a matching 2 Mb (1.2 mb formatted) 8 inch floppy drive. I was amused to find that the file server was fronted by two large red and green neon lights, like something from a 1960''s science fiction series. It took approximately 20-30 seconds to boot, and when the hard disc had reached the operating speed of 3,600 RPM, the green light illuminated, indicating it was online, and ready to boot the Q1 workstation. I taught myself to reset the workstation or start a cold boot after the file server had fully booted up from cold, after a few false starts. My model came with a rebranded NEC spinwriter printer, which is similar to a daisywheel but with an unusual thimble printing mechanism. Print quality was outstanding. Being a high end business computer, build quality was breathtaking compared to the 8 bit machines I used in the 1980s. I am not surprised that NASA used these computers and they were exported across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. When booting off the hard drive and communicating over the high speed (300 kb) 10-Base 2 coax network, it was a respectably fast machine. The Q1 had a distinctive boot sequence : it would boot from the floppy (if present), then off the hard drive, so it was advisable to remove the floppy disc before booting the file server. The 32K memory seemed to be the main limitation when editing large files in the EDIT editor. The Q1 appeared to page text in and out of memory, which was fine on the hard drive but less satisfactory on the 8 inch drive. I was impressed by the PL/1 compiler, a port from IBM System/360 mainframes. There was also a COBOL compiler. It must have been a huge challenge to fit these complex language compilers into a Z80 machine with a mere 32K of RAM. Finally, the quality of documentation was excellent, and they were quite speedy when connected to a dedicated Q1 file server (10 mb hard drive and 8 inch 1.2 mb floppy). I had to fashion up my own coaxial cable and solder in a T-piece terminator, but to my surprise it worked and booted up.

I found a benchmark of the Q1 in an old Association of Computer Users magazine that was archived on the Wayback machine. The reference starts on page 126 of the following URL. The URL is https://archive.org/details/AssociationOfComputerUsers_volume3.0/page/n125/mode/1up

I found an old report from NASA about a program they developed for the Q1 Lite. It lists sample commands and discusses how the Q1 processes the output of the program. Here is the URL https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800005726/page/n51/mode/1up