Royal's Computer

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.

White sock alert!

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.

Handy Little Thing

The carriage for my HH was feeling a little sluggish so I called Bill at MTE to see if he could help me do some on-the-fly diagnosis. The problem is that the carriage grabs and feels heavy in the same place. Letters pile up and some spacing between letters can be dodgy.

I was able to walk through a few diagnistic things when Bill said, "You can take the tension by removing the drawband."

That was a good idea, but I only had two hands to do this and there is a good chance I would have lost control of the the drawband causing damage to my fingers and havoc to my typewriter.

Royal's engineers thought of that and provided a handy screw for temorarily affixing the drawband to the body.

I could see that this feature might also be helpful if you were trying to fit a new drawband.

My KMG, FP, and HH all have this little knobly screw. I would have to check the other Royal desktops when I get home, but this was new to me and I could see it being a handy little thing.

I Thought it was an FP

Herb Caen charmingly called his typewriter the Loyal Royal. It was a running mention in many of his columns. For the longest time I thought the Royal in question was this FP at the San Francisco Public Library:

But in a news article from the San Francisco Appeal (an on-line newspaper) it appears if Herb Caen's typewriter will go up for auction to fund a SF Police summer program. Obviously, a worthy cause but it brings up some serious questions about Caen's typewriter provenance.

This is a picture of Caen; the baldness, the smile. It's him alright, but the typewriter on which he jauntily leans is not an FP. It's an HH. Strange, no? It would be perfectly reasonable for a columnist to have several typewriters and they both my be Royals, but if I was the SF Library or the soon-to-be auction winner, I would love to know which one was more loyal; the FP or the HH.

FP In The Library

This is the FP in the school's library. When it was in my possession -- being more willing to beg forgiveness than ask permission -- I went ahead an painted it. The color was not exactly like the historic FP green, but gave an overall impression of the same color. In reality, the gray was chipped and scrapped from years of use in public education. This is one of the few public typewriters I have been able to get set up around our campus.

Krylon Celery Green. It's much lighter than the old FP green.

This FP has a a darker tint and earmuffs. 
The earmuffs are a carbon ribbon kit. 
Photo via Machines of Loving Grace

Blue FP from a Life magazine advertisement.

I have started to see an interesting shift in the mindset of my students. The typewriters are no longer objects of curiosity or antiquated tools, they are starting to become part of the fabric of their educational experience. It's an interesting and nuanced change. I am proud to have some hand in making that happen.