Royal is one of my favorite typewriter brands. I have all the
greats; No. 10, HH, FP, tons of portables. They may not be the
prettiest typewriters, but they are very numerous. Did you know
that Royal also dipped their toes into computer technology? It's
true, but the world of office typewriters and data technology is
was not too much of a departure for the largest typewriter
company ever. The story is long and complicated and I hope to
share some things I learned about this computer.
The Beginning
Not surprisingly, Royal didn't make this typewriter computer
themselves. Dr. Stan Frankel working for Librascope of Glendale,
CA designed the computer. Librascope manufactured it and
presented it at the Automation Show and Computer Clinic show in
Chicago.
Paul Kane, in the story to the right , looks like he is not
enjoying the Holiday activities.
I can only imagine that Royal sent their VP of R&D (E. H.
Dreher) and Senior Project Engineer (I. S. Lerner) to the show
with the mission of finding a computer for Royal McBee. They saw
this computer from a small engineering outfit owned by a large
defense contractor and designed by a little-known computer
pioneer. The negotiations are lost to history, but in the end
Royal McBee made a move that secured the LGP-30 as a part of the
Royal product line.
General Precision and Royal would form a new company called
Royal Precision and General Precision's Librascope subsidiary
would make the computers. (I want to say that Royal Precision is
the best name for a computer company ever devised by the mind of
man.) Royal would handle the marketing and sales and develop
peripherals for the computer. GPE/Librascope would make the
computers and create software. Having recently acquired the
Robotyper, Royal had some interesting technology and patents to
work with sop peripherals made sense. In addition, Royal had
hundreds of sales offices and a sales force that was experienced
in getting machines into business settings.
Robotypers worked by having ghostly triplet secretaries marked
for death typing on spectral typewriters.
Royal McBee transferred Librascope application engineers to
their payroll and started training people how to code for the
new computer.
One of the Application Engineers (and programming school
instructors) was a man called Mel Kaye who would later go down
in computer computer folklore in The Story of Mel.
The Machine
Royal's computer by the standards of the time was better than a
desk calculator, but not as good as some of the big iron
starting to become available. It was a small (desk-sized)
general purpose 32-bit (sort-of) word binary computer.
As with all old computers, the specifications are amazingly
meager:
Type:
General purpose, electronic, digital, single address, fixed
binary point, fractional, stored program
Number Base:
2 (binary)
Word Length:
9 decimal digits plus sign (30 binary bits plus sign bit and
spacer bit)
Mode of Operation:
Serial (Settle in with a cup of tea!)
Memory:
Magnetic drum, 4096 words, 3 one word recalculating registers.
Clock Frequency:
120 KC (0.00012 GHz is my math correct?)
Access Time:
2 ms. minimum, 17 ms. maximum
Transfer Time:
1 ms. minimum, 17 ms. maximum
Addition Time:
26 ms. excluding access time
Multiplication or Division Time:
17 ms. excluding access time
Input-Output:
Paper tape or electric typewriter
Size:
Depth - 26", Length - 44", Height - 33"
Weight Uncrated:
740 lbs
Cooling System:
Internal forced air blower
Heat Dissipation:
5000 B.T.U. /hr.
Power Requirement:
115-volt, 60-cycle, single phase, 13 ampere alternating current
Number of Tubes:
113
Number of Diodes:
1350
These specifications come from the LGP-30 Programming Manual.
To save money on memory, this computer used a magnetic drum for
RAM. It's akin to using your disk for swap, but in this case it
was all swap!
Magnetic drum memory was slow, but with optimization the
Librascope boffins were able to get the latency down from
17(microseconds) to 2 microseconds through the careful
arrangement of data on the drum. We are all very spoiled with
our fast computers, but 2ms seems pretty fast to me. On another
note, I don't know what that drum sounded like spinning at 3700
rpm, but I bet it was loud.
For input/output Librascope used a Friden Flexowriter. I think
the overall aesthetics would have been helped with a Royal, but
the Flexowriter was common terminal for early computers.
It wasn't much in the way of a computer, but for many colleges
and engineering firms it offered the possibility of owning a
computer versus renting one from IBM. IBM had notoriously strict
lease agreements that would charge a user for anything outside
the lease agreement. Big IBMs had panel meters that counted the
number of hours in operation. In other words, if you leased a
computer for 8 hours a day, any use beyond that 8 hours would
incur a fee. Sure, IBM was the name in computers, but cost can
definitely be a motivator. In the end, over 500 of these
computers were sold.
In this post, I only scratched the surface of this old Royal
computer. There is folklore (as mentioned earlier), emulation,
and restoration and I plan on taking a deeper dive into this
amazing piece of computer history.
