Redditor discovers a legendary computer from 1956 in the ancestral basement

On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announce They found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their ancestral basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 made in Europe and may be better known by the name of the computer Mill uses in famous piece A pirate tradition.

Developed by Stan Frankel At the California Institute of Technology in 1954, the LGP-30 (short for “Librascope General Purpose 30”) sold for $47,000 (about $512,866 today, adjusted for inflation) and weighed in at 800 pounds. However, people considered it a small computer at the time due to its desk-like size (about 44 x 33 x 26 inches). according to Masswerk.atThe LGP-30 included 113 vacuum tubes, 1,450 solid-state diodes, and a rotating magneto. drum memory—6.5 inches in diameter and a 7-inch long tube rotating at 3,700 rpm — can store 4,069 31-bit words (equivalent to about 15.8 kilobytes in modern times).

Besides the LGP-30 main unit, c-wizz found a Flexowriter-style controller (used for input and output with the device) and what looked like a paper tape reader for storing external data. A few PDP-8/e and some related equipment lie nearby. “Looks like there are more modules belonging to PDP/8E’s as well,” c-wizz wrote in a Reddit comment. “There’s a full 19″ shelf where this is all supposed to fit in. Maybe I can find some brochures and try to put it together.”

Although the PDP-8/e devices are rare and valuable on their own, the LGP-30 is arguably the most interesting part of vault discovery as it is part of the hacker legend. in the epic”Mel’s storyFor the first time in a Usenet newsgroup in 1983, a Librascope programmer named Melvin Kaye was tasked with porting a Blackjack program from an LGP-30 to another computer. The author of the story, Ed NatherHe was later tasked with finding a bug in the software, and along the way, he discovered Kaye’s innovative and unorthodox programming tricks. also, Edward Lorenz It is said that it was placed Chaos Theory (and the “butterfly effect”) as a result of weather experiments conducted on the LGP-30.

So what was this legendary machine doing in the ancestral vault? Ars contacted c-wizz but did not receive a response prior to publishing this story. In a Reddit comment, c-wizz Wrote“The only thing I know is that my grandfather used it for some civil engineering calculations in the 1960s, and that he was one of the very few people in the country who owned such a computer in particular.”

Regardless of the ancestral use of LGP-30, it appears that there may be a connection between it and PDP-8/e units located nearby. In another comment, c-wizz wrote, “It appears that there are some instructions on how to port the code written for LGP-30 to PDP8\e.”

After sitting in a basement for decades, the LGP-30 will likely need a lot of work to get it working again. This is where a qualified computer museum might come in, and c-wizz seems to be looking into it. “It would be really nice if someone could get this thing working again,” c-wizz wrote. “I found a museum in Germany (from where I am) that apparently has LGP-30 workers. I think I’ll get in touch with them.”