Redditor discovers legendary 1956 computer in grandparents’ basement

guest · Nov 8, 2022

The 1956 LGP-30 computer, subject of hacker lore, is one of only 45 made in Europe.
By Benj Edwards @benjedwards - November 9, 2022

On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents' basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by "Mel" in a famous piece of hacker lore.
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Developed by Stan Frankel at California Institute of Technology in 1954, the LGP-30 (short for "Librascope General Purpose 30") originally retailed for $47,000 (about $512,866 today, adjusted for inflation) and weighed in at 800 pounds. Even so, people considered it a small computer at the time due to its desk-like size (about 44×33×26 inches). According to Masswerk.at, the LGP-30 included 113 vacuum tubes, 1,450 solid-state diodes, and rotating magnetic drum memory—a 6.5-inch diameter and 7-inch long tube rotating at 3,700 RPM—that could store 4,069 31-bit words (equivalent to about 15.8 modern kilobytes).
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Along with the main LGP-30 unit, c-wizz found a Flexowriter typewriter-style console (used for input and output with the machine) and what looks like a paper tape reader for external data storage. A few PDP-8/e machines and some related equipment lurked nearby.

Although the PDP-8/e machines are rare and valuable on their own, the LGP-30 arguably stands out as the most interesting part of the basement discovery because it's part of hacker legend.
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In the epic "The Story of Mel," first posted to a Usenet newsgroup in 1983, a Librascope programmer named Melvin Kaye has been tasked with porting a Blackjack program from the LGP-30 to another computer. The story's author, Ed Nather, is later tasked with finding a bug in the software, and along the way, he discovers Kaye's ingenious and unconventional programming tricks. Also, Edward Lorenz reportedly developed chaos theory (and the "butterfly effect") as a result of weather experiments conducted on the LGP-30.
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