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.