Warming up the LGP-30
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- Опубликовано: 9 сен 2024
- The LGP 30 computer is a computer made of valves, diodes and a drum memory.
This machine is from 1958. It is located at the museum of the computer science
faculty of the university of Stuttgart, Germany. The computer is in a fully
functional state.
In this clip, the machine is shown starting up and doing some work.
Just to get an imagination what that kind of machine looked and feeled like.
For further information (in German), go to:
computermuseum....
I used one of these machines around 1961-62. The listing shown at the end of this video is in a programming language called Act III. The LGP-30 had the most complicated bootstrap procedure from a cold start that I have ever encountered. I'd love to see a video of that process.
By far the most adorable computer ever! Beautiful 50s color, small cabinet, industrial printing terminal, and fans that are rather polite, as if they'd say "Hey, we're cooling off this little computer, don't mind us!" A 50's desktop computer... I freaking LOVE the architecture. Bit serial everything, use the drum for everything... Nothing like it.
Aah zannussi local luanderettes samsungs etc lomg gome ,well smuggled!
Fans? I think what you're hearing is the memory drum! Spinning at 3700rpm and allowing an execution rate of about 60 instructions a second, if I read the documentation correctly. This was not a very fast computer - but probably a bit cheaper than some contemporary alternatives.
@@Kromaatikse About 400 additions/subtractions per second. Oddly enough, the compatible transistor machine, the LGP-21, was actually slower.
@@Kromaatikse I believe what is initially heard is the cooling fans. After the vacuum portion of the system warms up and I suppose all of the voltages level out, the rotation of the memory drum is started, which is the additional sound heard.
Maybe not a fast machine, but certainly faster than crunching the numbers with pencil, paper and plenty of erasers! :)
Ich bin stolz darauf, dass dieser Rechner vor fast 50 Jahren mein Begleiter in der Firma war, in der ich gerade ausgelernt hatte; direkt gesagt,ich war in der Abteilung kaufmännisch tätig, wo diese Rechner standen (Eurocomp, Minden) und bin heute noch stolz darauf, dass diese ihren Platz in einem Museum gefunden haben.
Dieses Video sehe ich mir darum immer gern an. - Dass die Zeit technisch total sich weiter entwickelt hat, ist bekannt. Heute" hänge" ich an einem modernen PC.! Dieses "Technikinteresse" wurde höchstwahrscheinlich damals schon geweckt!
Monika Baumbach Neid ! Ich bin 1960 geboren, also etwas zu spaet fuer diese Epoche der elektro-mechanischen Computer, finde sie aber viel faszinierender als die heutihen elektronischen Versionen. Und: coole Farbe und gutes Design. Hach !!!😍
I love that someone decided to record this. Reading Where the Wizards Stay Up Late really made me curious what the computers they were using were like.
It's the CPU register display. IBM and Burroughs would do this with light bulbs, but this machine literally stored and processed everything of a spinning drum, one bit at a time. -So it was easy (and waay cool) to use a basic oscilloscope sweep to show what the machine was thinking.
It's one of those new light weight desktop computers that weighed only 1/2 a ton. Smooth!
Ha. We had this computer in High School in 1968. I programmed it in my very first computer class. I loved that class.
Can you tell us a bit about the computer architecture? How much RAM? How many bits were in a word? How wide was the ALU, or was it a bit-serial machine?
I used one working for NATO in in the Netherlands 1958. We were computing missile trajectories, but the whole computation was too much. But it allowed rapid generation of case-specific interpolation tables.
There was, at least when I started, no symbolic assembler. We wrote code on sheets, and then translated the codes ourselves into octal. There was an octal to binary translator to create the program tape. Neat.
Was writing computer code in octal any easier than writing in binary?
@@gregorymalchuk272 Of Course. 1/3 the number of symbols. Soon we also had codes for the instructions.
2 letters instead of 4 octal digits.
As soon as he hits the button at 0:20 seconds im just like "wow" absolutely impressed and im listening to the hum and really feel the magic and honored to witness this happening at the same time i have no idea what im looking at.
THIS THING IS AWESOME! Even in my favorite style of architecture, 1950s streamlined modern!
I know, right? It actually reminds me of steampunk, although I know it has no right to be that under the hood. I'm 100% in love though.
@@swiftfox3461 Maybe Atompunk?
It looks like a 1950s jukebox.
Sooooo cool! I always wanted to see the oscilloscope register output! Awesome thanks for keeping this baby working!
The big red/green status indicators are "HALTED" (red) and "CALCULATING" (green). The row of buttons underneath from left to right: Normal, Single-Operation, Manual(?), Pause, Operation, ?. Next row: Start, Clear Counter, Set Counter, Run (?), On, Off. Next Row: 32, 16, 8, 4, Enter, Jump.
I guess "single operation" is in fact "single step" (some terms on the buttons are ambiguous; ? means that I could not read whats written on the button).
I love the fact that they called this a desktop computer because it was generally the size of a desk, however, it's weight was over 360 kg, a very heavy desk indeed. What a gift to the world, that this still works and is kept, thanks University of Stuttgart
this computer must be the star in an old scifi mov!!!
Great source for sound effects!
It's Mel's computer :).
No, that was a related but more powerful computer called the RPC-4000.
@@douro20 Both machines were mentioned in the story of Mel
to answer a question by januainfermi:
Used one around 1957 to compute interpolation tables for more complex flightpath integrations at SADTC in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, supportingg NATO.
A Flexowriter? The printer of choice for the 50s era MIT hacker. I remember reading about these. They're mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers.
Reminds me of the duotronic computers aboard TOS Star Trek's Enterprise. So retro. Love it.
The machine of Mel, the real programmer :-)
Close - Mel's famous story relates to the LGP-30's successor, for which no documentation appears to have survived in public. It's reasonably easy to figure out what it might have looked like though, using the LGP-30 as a baseline.
@@Kromaatikse apart from the pictures you can find by googling "RPC-4000", or the features, maintenance, programming and training manuals that have been on bitsavers for at least 10 years at least - no, no documentation survives.
That's really cool.
Built like a jukebox 😍
I want one!
The fact that the printer has a keyboard and looks so much like a regular mechanical typewriter is haunting. Looks like it's bewitched. Cool!!!!
That was one common form of the then-ubiquitous teletype - they really were typewriters with electronics grafted on, and were actually designed for telegraph service, not computing. Other forms of terminal equipment came later.
An English panel (from Wiki) says:
Top row; STOP, COMPUTE.
Second row; NORMAL, ONE OPERATION, MANUAL INPUT, STAND BY, OPERATE, STAND BY TO OPERATE.
Third row; START, CLEAR COUNTER, FILL INSTR., EXECUTE INSTR., POWER ON, POWER OFF.
Fourth row; BREAK POINT 32, BREAK POINT 16, BREAK POINT 8, BREAK POINT 4, 6 BIT INPUT, TRANSFER CONTROL.
More info from Wikipedia
en wikipedia org/wiki/LGP-30
Neat! It looks like something that could have inspired Star Trek.
I think it was an LGP30 and its floating point truncation that started the whole chaos theory thing when Edward Lorenz tried to model systems of DE's for weather systems on one. Magnetic drum storage?
Yes, but does it play the poker game? :-)
Wow! that was really advanced technology in the '60s, unknown to most people. Where did they use it?
@weirdmindofesh
Yep...it means "calculating"...
@BadOeynhausenLP Es ist nicht die Originallackierung, soweit ich weiß. Da in Stuttgart gab es mal noch einen, der war braun, wenn ich mich recht erinnere.
Cool video, wish I knew more german so I could understand what all the buttons meant!
&eB
use google translate .... I just noticed 12yrs ago... haha ... try it now though.
@@stevenflogerzi1955 Thanks!
Not sure how good Google translate was 12 years ago, but it seems to be pretty good these days.
Interesting! tks a lot mate!.
Very freaking cool.
Some models even included a toaster oven.
This is my computerrrrr Great-grandma
Wow! I really didn't know what these were good for. It appears they could type much faster than people on a typewriter. However, what still remains a mystery to me is how the computer was programmed for these calculations with such little number of keys to press on the computer itself.
Programs were generally prepared on paper punch-tape in those days, or on punch-cards for IBMs, directly in machine code. You can see a punch-tape reader and writer on the side of the teletype. The computer was used for running calculations, not for editing text or code.
Incidentally, a skilled typist would be able to keep up with a teletype quite comfortably, if they were both typing English.
did anyone else see that commodore in the background?
Yes, a PET. First saw one when I was in primary school!
I urge to see some games to run on that ...
Yeah! Like Crysis! :-/
chess, tic tac toe, some simplistic rogue like game, it doesn't matter. More software for these obsolete machines would imply more skillful programmers and less crap around the world.
If you could run crysis on that let me know ;)
Think about universality of computation. This thing can run Crysis or whatever. The framerate won't be great, but hey.
I would be satisfied to see some simple games in ascii, but Crysis @1fpsyear is something else ... :)
like blackjack?
Since the machine has a magnetic drum, are the programs saved when the machine is turned off?
JV783 Not exactly. The drum is the main memory of the computer. It is the device you hear starting to spin up at 1:20. The drum not only is the main memory, but also stores the computer's registers. It is erased and re-initialized during startup- there is a special sequence for startup which most former operators will remember quite fondly.
JV783 Oh...and the drum took 45 minutes to spin down. If you turned the computer back on at any point before then, you took the risk of scoring the drum!
douro20 Wow, that's definitely not a machine to mistreat then. I was actually wondering why they let it sit for so long after power on. I suspected something was "warming up" on the inside or something. Glad to see I was somewhat on the right track.
@@douro20
Ahh, this is the info I wanted. I suspected it was a bit serial. They did that to save cost and space.
This computer was built by a rather obscure division of Royal Typewriter Company.
1500 watts of pure computing power...!
I'd like to see the portable version.
This IS portable ("pushable") version - it has casters (just like Bendix G-15).
But the loop had no test in it.
What is the green display? Looks almost like a logic analyzer.
Juergen Mueller developed a cycle-accurate LGP-30 emulation for the Numato Mimas FPGA development board.
www.e-basteln.de/lgp30/
Where is the usb Port?
For a computer that doesn't use trabsistors, it's dang small!. Are the delay lines in the restoration still using murcery?
I know this is a couple of years late but this computer doesn't use delay lines. It has 4096 31-bit (30 bits plus a sign bit) of drum memory and three general purpose registers which are also on the drum.
I'm not german but I take it that the light labeled Rechnet refers to processor activity.
I was thinking that. Consider the implications for a second: modern computers may sometimes have an activity light for the HDD. That computer had an activity light for computing itself. Just crazy.
@@swiftfox3461 You should see the front panels for some of the minicomputers that came later.
@@swiftfox3461
And the green CRT shows you the state of the machine's registers.
@@gregorymalchuk272 More machines should come with those. Although these days the screen would update way too frequently to read with gigahertz+ frequencies.
HALT!! ACHTUNG!!!!
Fallout era computer!
Is that the whole computer seen in the video, or it is just a control panel?
+Westwurtzli
The whole computer. The CPU and drum memory are in the large cabinet to the right of the console. The tape reader/punch is on the left. The machine is very compact for one made in the late 1950s due to its use of silicon diodes to implement most of the logic. There are 113 tubes and around 1,450 silicon diodes, according to the Wikipedia article. It was a very slow machine, using a bit-serial architecture, but it had more than enough storage and having a 31-bit word size meant it could work with large numbers very easily.
Este es el equipo q originó la teoría del caos...?
Cual es la teoria del caos
That's one big ma-uh-jam-uh 🤣 Sounds like a nuclear weapon arming. -- They ran a code called D.O.P.E. (Dartmouth) on this thing.
I'm sorry but what was it used for? It seems like a huge typewriter memory machine
Somebody said it calculated flight paths for NATO.
@@gregorymalchuk272 interesting
So it looks like in 1958 German house-wives already had automatic washing machines. No wonder Soviet Block lost the Cold War!
They don't make them like that anymore.
Now it's just lightweight junk made out of plastic and stamp sheet metal.
NO ! This darling wheight's multiple "tons" !
There is nothin lightweight on it :)
LGP-30 weight is only 384 kg, so it WAS lightweight (for those times).
computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dev_en/lgp30/lgp30_1.html
Nerdologia!
I’m guessing it doesn’t run Windows 10 🙂
Sorry, you are right. Only Linux :-)
@@schweineful Does this thing had operating system? If so which it used. Im researching for a school project
Apparently, it was used as the basis for Windows 95.
do not try to do any gaming on this machine. it will always win! definitely avoid the game thermo nuclear war.
Need new props for fallout 4? Look no further!
Lol, I can see where you are coming from. Although I would say that this machine is a beauty all on its own merits. I love this thing.
But can it run , , , ?
Bill Gates...
Warum waren die Maschinen damals nur so hässlich lackiert?
can it run cry......???.........sorry can't bring myself to say it