January 2004

Revised.: July 2004, March 2005

The LGP-30 and its Effect on Computing at the University of Alberta

Keith SmillieDepartment of Computing Science

University of Alberta

AbstractSome computational methods at the University of Alberta before the introduction of electronic

computers are described briefly. The University’s first computer, the LGP-30 which was acquired in

1957, is described and examples are given of its use.

IntroductionFor almost forty-five years there was a small two-story brick building measuring some eighteen by

forty feet immediately to the north and west of the Arts Building on the University of Alberta campus. It

was built during the Second World War for testing aviation gasoline and cost $12,671.24 with an

additional $3987.17 for equipment. It was known, informally at least, as the “Gas Lab”. In 1954 the

testing work was moved to the newly constructed Alberta Research Council

laboratories on the campus. The Gas Lab was then occupied by the Faculty of

Arts and given the more formal name of Arts Building Annex. As one of its uses

was for housing mice used in experimental work by the Department of

Psychology, it was known to some as the “Mouse House”. It was demolished without fanfare during the

summer of 1986. No photographs appear to exist in the University Archives. All that remains are a few

bricks which were taken as souvenirs from the hole left by the demolition crew before it was filled. One

of these bricks is shown here.

Our present interest in this minor aspect of the University of Alberta’s history is because in the late

1950s the Arts Building Annex was home to the University’s first computer, the Royal McBee LGP-30.

At sometime during the 1960/61 academic year, quite possibly at the beginning, the computer and

supporting staff moved to the newly opened Physical Sciences Centre. The LGP-30 was replaced by an

IBM 1620 in 1961 although it continued to be used for teaching purposes for two more years. It was then

placed in storage, safely some of us thought, for about ten years when it disappeared without a trace.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to reconstruct over forty years later the computing milieu at

the University of Alberta just before the arrival of the LGP-30 and to show some of the effects that it had

on computing practices. Unfortunately most of the documents relating to the use of the LGP-30 are lost

and all of the persons who were involved have retired and many have left the city. Fortunately a few are

still working and come to the campus regularly. Sadly though others have died or are in failing health.

However we shall do our best with help from those persons and records remaining to reconstruct a small

episode of local academic computing history.

As planning has already begun to demolish part of the Physical Sciences Centre, possibly a few notes

taken from a booklet1 prepared for its official opening on May 24, 1961 might help prevent it from

suffering a fate similar to that of the Arts Building Annex. The Centre was designed as a complex of a

Physics and Mathematics wing and a Chemistry wing at right angles to each other, and a shared lecture

wing and also an auditorium and library. The total floor area was 376,000 square feet. It was intended to

accommodate an expected total student population of 6,500 with some room for expansion. (The estimate

of the present total student population is 33,729.) The construction cost was $7,600,000 and an additional

$900,000 was allowed for equipment. Construction proceeded ahead of schedule and most of the space

was usable at the beginning of the 1960/61 academic year.

Before the LGP-30: MathematicsAn excellent account of mathematical and statistical computing in the Department of Mathematics at

the University of Alberta is given in a short departmental history2 written by E. S. Keeping. Professor

Keeping joined the Department of Mathematics in 1929 and retired in 1961, having been Head for the

previous seven years. He continued to lecture for the following nine years, and maintained his association

with the University for many more years. He died in 1984 in his eighty-ninth year.

An early set of mathematical tables used in the Department of Mathematics was Campbell's

Numerical Tables prepared by Professor J. W. Campbell who came to the University in 1920 and was

well-known for his work in astronomy and classical mechanics. The tables were divided into two parts,

the first giving tables for the common logarithm, square, cube and reciprocal, the circular functions, and a

short table of exponential and hyperbolic functions, and the second giving an extensive table of

hyperbolic functions which, according to Professor Keeping, Professor Campbell "himself calculated on a

hand machine". It was printed locally, first appearing in 1929, and was reprinted in 1946. At some

subsequent date Knott's Four-Figure Mathematical Tables, first published in 1900, was introduced into

the Department and was used until the mid 1960s. These tables were loaned to students during

examinations, and were clearly marked with bold red lines and a cautionary warning on the cover that

they were the property of the University of Alberta and were to be neither defaced or mutilated nor found

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in "private possession". Eventually, these tables were remaindered in the University Bookstore for

twenty-five cents each.

The Department of Mathematics moved into the Physical Sciences Centre when it opened occupying

the fifth floor. There was office accommodation for 25 full-time teaching staff and about the same

number of part-time teaching assistants and graduates students. There was

also a computing room shown in the figure to the right which has been taken

from booklet already referred to1. (Professor Keeping is seated at the front.)

Professor Keeping was well aware of the advantages of the use of mechanical

desk calculators in statistical calculations, and has the following remarks

about their use in the Department:

Equipment is another item which has increased significantly in cost in recent years. For a

long time the laboratories in elementary statistics used small Monroe calculators [and also the

Multo calculator shown in Figure 2] which were cranked by hand, and there were only one or two

electric desk-calculators in the whole department, of rather old-fashioned type. By 1962 many of

the old calculators were almost worn out, and some newer types of hand calculators were

purchased. [These were probably the Swedish-made Odhner calculators which weighed thirteen

pounds and which accomplished multiplication and division by addition and subtraction with

repeated shifting.] A little later some improved electric calculators, such as the Frieden square-

root type, came along and then some desk electronic models were purchased.

The Multo Calculator shown here was also used for statistical calculations in the Department of

Mathematics until the 1960s. The only other reference that Professor Keeping makes to equipment prior

to the late 1950s is the following: “In 1955 the department purchased an electric kettle to be used in

preparing tea or coffee before the [Mathematics] colloquium, and the staff were assessed one dollar each

to pay for it.”

Professor Keeping was the co-author of a two-volume text on

mathematical statistics in which a large number of carefully

worked numerical examples were a prominent feature. In the

introductory chapter of the first volume3 there is a short section

entitled "Calculating Machines" in which we read the following:

"A calculating machine is constructed to add and subtract. By

means of continued addition or subtraction, operations involving multiplication, division, and square root

can also be performed with great speed." Later in the same section he gives the details of performing

repetitive calculations using as an example finding the values of "12 + 6x for x = 5, 7, 15, 12, etc."

Finally, it is interesting to note that Professor Keeping's lectures in the Faculty of Engineering had an

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influence on the design of the pocket calculator. Two of his former students who were subsequently

employed by Hewlett-Packard remembered his lectures on reverse Polish notation and incorporated this

feature into the company's calculators4.

Before the LGP-30: AgricultureThe Faculty of Agriculture has always required calculating machines for the analysis of experimental

data. In Canada an excellent example of the importance of proper statistical designs and efficient

calculating procedures was given by Cyril H. Goulden who worked for the then Canada Department of

Agriculture, first at the Dominion Rust Research Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba and later at the

Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa. In the 1952 edition of his Methods of Statistical Analysis, first

published in 1939, he makes the following remarks:

In the development of each procedure an attempt has been made to form a uniform method. After

general statements the algebraic development is given, and then is followed by a completely

worked-out example.

The book contains a very large number of numerical examples for everything from the simplest statistical

procedures to the very complex lattice designs used in agricultural work. From the late 1950s Goulden

took a keen interest in electronic computers, encouraging their use in the Department of Agriculture and

even speculating if the Department should build its own computer.

For many years the biometrics course in the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Alberta used a

statistics manual prepared by Professor L. P. V. Johnson5. This carefully written document with its

numerous worked examples clearly follows the format adopted by Goulden. Indeed the first edition of

Goulden’s text is one of the 16 papers and books cited in the References.

The Department of Soil Science has carried out fertilizer trials since the early 1920s. However, it was

not until 1956 that statistical designs such as randomized blocks and balanced lattices were introduced.

For the first two years desk calculators were used for the calculations. One of the machines used was a

Monromatic which allowed the operator to accumulate at one time the sums of squares of two sets of

observations and their cross products. This was accomplished by entering pairs of observations, one pair

at a time with one datum on the left side of the keyboard and the other on the right. The cumulative sums

of squares would be displayed on the left and right sides of the accumulator dial with the sums of cross

products appearing between them. Also a counter mounted on one side of the calculator would show the

number of pairs of observations involved in these sums.

One final computational example from the Faculty of Agriculture is of interest because it forms a link

between the use of hand calculators and the LGP-30. It is a report entitled "On the meaning of marks"

written by Brian Hocking, Head of the Department of Entomology, and dated June 4, 1958. It gives the

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results of an analysis of the variations in the distribution of the final marks in some selected courses at the

University of Alberta, and makes recommendations for removing inequities caused by these variations. In

the Procedures section of the report we read that "The first calculations were done on a desk calculator;

when a digital computer [the LGP-30] became available, this was used to complete the work." This report

is written in a style evocative of a gentler age at the University, and opens delightfully with the words

"For my personal guidance in trying to deal justly with my own classes, I set out to determine, during a

few of the less crowded hours last summer, ...".

Before the LGP-30: PhysicsThe first use of an electronic computer on the campus was in the Department of Physics which in

May 1957 established a link with the FERUT computer at the University of Toronto6. An account of this

work was reported in the Summer 1957 issue of The New Trail, the University of Alberta Alumni

Magazine, in a short article entitled "Electronic brain aids University research"7. It is of interest to quote

from this article as an example of how the computer was presented to the public:

Any problem that can be reduced to a numerical analysis and requires a numerical answer can

now be answered in minutes on the U. of A. campus through the medium of teletype and FERUT,

a high-speed digital electronic computer housed in the computation centre at the University of

Toronto.

A direct-line, teletype communication system with FERUT has been placed with the

University through the courtesy of the Canadian National Telegraphs, on an experimental basis.

Equipment is located in the Physics Department laboratory, basement floor, Arts Building.

This new type of "correspondence course" has students and physics professors at the U. of A.

preparing problems on teletype ticker tape every week. Then, on Thursdays at 5:00 p.m., a direct

line with the computation centre in Toronto is cleared for University use. Transmission time is

made available by the Canadian National Telegraphs and time on FERUT is paid for by the

National Research Council.

The mechanics of getting a solution to any mechanical problem are comparatively simple.

Previously prepared tapes of problems are fed through the teletype machine on the campus and

identical tapes are punched instantaneously in the computation centre in Toronto. FERUT is fed

the problem tapes which are then processed and FERUT feeds back an answer tape in typed

numbers in tabular form. The answer tape is fed through a Toronto teletype which activates the

keys of the machine on the campus.

There are many particular advantages of the new hook-up. Ambitious problems in the fields

of physics, mathematics, engineering, statistics, etc., can now be solved on the campus in a matter

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of minutes, that otherwise would have taken months, perhaps years, of hard labour on a desk

calculator. Problems of a numerical nature can be solved much more accurately than previously,

and through the teletype medium, operators at both ends can converse.

It is interesting to compare the above account with some recollections made many years later by Don

Betts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta who was very much involved in using FERUT

and later the LGP-30:

During the 1956/57 academic year [the theoretical physicists] decided to try to gain access to

FERUT. Don Scott, who was then Assistant Head of the Department, was enthusiastically

supportive of our goal and was instrumental in completing the necessary arrangements.

The director of FERUT, Dr. C. C. Gotlieb, agreed to let us have access to it, Canadian

National Telegraphs agreed to lend us a teletype machine and to provide free use of a telegraph

line from Edmonton to Toronto one evening a week, and the National Research Council provided

for the cost of time on FERUT. By April 1957 all arrangements were in place, and I was sent to

Toronto for two weeks to learn to write programs and prepare input tapes for the machine. I was

helped by Dr. B. H. "Trixie" Worsley and Miss Dorothy Goulding of the Computation Centre in

learning Transcode, a high-level language for FERUT which was written at the University of

Toronto. I did not learn the much more difficult machine-language programming. ...

The teletype machine was established in a glorified closet in the basement of the Arts

Building and the teletype link was first used on May 9, 1957. The official opening of the facility,

which included a ribbon cutting, was attended by the President of the National Research Council,

Dr. E. W. R. Stacie, the Director of the Western Region of Canadian National Railways, the

President of the University of Alberta, Dr. Andrew Stewart, representatives of the media, and by

all directly involved.

Throughout the summer we and our students would prepare programs and code teletype tapes

through the week for transmission on Tuesday evenings. [The article in the New Trail cited

previously gave the day as Thursday.] The two copies would then be run through a mechanical

comparator at the Toronto end. Any discrepancies were fixed up by the exchange of teletype

messages. The system worked tolerably well except when there was a thunderstorm anywhere

between Edmonton and Toronto!

Before the LGP-30: EngineeringThe experiences of other departments and faculties would appear to be similar to those of

Mathematics and Agriculture with calculations, many of them statistical, being performed on Marchant,

Munroe and Frieden calculators. It is unfortunate that few records appear to exist of this work. However,

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a few remarks on engineering calculations are given in a history of the Faculty of Engineering4:

Their education was highly structured, free of options, very basic and without

computers. True, there were the standard six-place log tables and one volume of “Vega”

eight-place tables and ten-inch slide rules. The Faculty owned the computer of that age, a

30-foot spiral slide rule which gave five figures at the low end and four at the upper end

but it took a hefty pair of arms to muscle it about.

There was also a 42-inch wooden slide rule, yellow with black markings, which hung for many years in

the University Bookstore over the counter where slide rules were sold. During the early 1980s it was

borrowed occasionally to demonstrate the operation of a slide rule to students, many of whom had never

seen one. It is now part of a permanent exhibit of early calculating devices and machines in the offices of

the Faculty of Science8.

Acquisition of the LGP-30We have seen that in the mid 1950s professional and academic computing needs at the University of

Alberta were being met by mathematical tables, mechanical and electromechanical calculators, slide

rules, and then by a few physicists using the University of Toronto's electronic computer.

In May, 1957 the President, Dr. Andrew Stewart, appointed a "Committee on Electronic Equipment"

to make an assessment of computing needs at the University. The seven-member committee was chaired

by Don Scott, with Don Betts as Secretary and Professor Keeping as one of the other members. In July

the Committee recommended unanimously the purchase of an LGP-30 General Purpose Computer from

the Royal McBee Corporation of Port Chester, New York at a price of forty thousand dollars. At the end

of the same month two or three members of the Committee attended a three-day course on computers in

Calgary which was sponsored by IBM.

In September the Committee's recommendations were approved by the Board of Governors, the order

for the computer was placed, and the computer was installed the following month. The original

installation consisted of the computer with a Flexowriter console (a modified electric typewriter with a

mechanical paper tape reader and punch), a photoelectric paper tape reader and a mechanical paper tape

punch, and an additional Flexowriter for the preparation of program and data tapes.

The University of Saskatchewan acquired an LGP-30 the same month as did the University of

Alberta. The first Canadian university to have a computer was, of course, the University of Toronto which

in 1948 started to design and build its own computer which was operated briefly and then replaced in

1952 or 1953 by the FERUT computer. The second Canadian university was the University of British

Columbia which acquired its computer in March 1957.

The LGP-30 was installed first in the basement of the Arts Building where the Department of Physics

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was then located. Harry Schiff, who was one of the physicists using the FERUT, can still remember going

with Don Betts to see the LGP-30 when, according to him, Don ran ahead of him down the hall to get the

first glimpse. The LGP-30 was soon moved to the Arts Building Annex. Initially it was operated on an

open-shop basis under the general supervision of the Committee on Electronic Computing with Don Betts

and another member of the Department of Physics taking a very active role. Users of the computer had to

do their own programming since only a few rudimentary programs were available.

The LGP-30 soon attracted the attention of many faculty at the University who recognized its

potential usefulness in their work. A brief article describing the computer and its use appeared in the Fall

1957 issue of The New Trail9. The last three paragraphs may give some indication of the enthusiasm that

greeted the installation of the computer:

University officials feel that the computer is sufficiently simple in operation to be used

generally by staff and students. It takes about two or three days to train an operator.

An indication of the scope of research opened up by this latest University acquisition may be

gained from the following illustration: An average type problem undertaken by a theoretical

physicist used to take about one month to solve through the use of a desk calculator. Now, the

same worker need spend about one day preparing his material to meet machine operation

requirements. Actual computations will take about one hour. Many problems which formerly

were considered too time consuming to attempt can now be tackled without hesitation.

The new digital computer will be of vital use to personnel in chemistry, physics, engineering,

plant science, social sciences, and other fields. Problems involving a number of variables can be

accurately solved in short order.

It was soon apparent that technical assistance would have to be provided to users of the computer, and

several students were hired to provide temporary support during the summer. Eventually the

administration of the computer and its use was made the responsiblility of a newly formed Computing

Centre with a mandate to offer computing services to the entire University. On November 1, 1960 Don

Scott was appointed Director of the Computing Centre.

Of the many students who provided programming assistance for the LGP-30 we shall mention only

two. One was Ursula Bielenstein (later Ursula Maydell) who worked part-time as a student and then in

1960 became the first full-time employee of the Computing Centre. She resigned a year later to begin

graduate work in statistics in the Department of Mathematics. The other was Bill Adams who came to the

University of Alberta in the summer of 1959 to complete an undergraduate degree begun at the University

of Edinburgh and who subsequently obtained one of the first M.Sc. degrees in computing at the

University. Upon completion of their graduate work both Ursula and Bill joined the academic staff of the

Department of Computing Science which was formed in 1964 and remained with the Department until

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their respective retirements almost thiry years later.

During the 1960/61 academic year the Computing Centre moved to the fourth floor of the Physical

Sciences Centre when it opened. A corner of the Computing Centre with the LGP-30 is shown in the

figure to the left which has been taken from the booklet1 prepared for the

official opening which makes the following reamarks about the Computing

Centre:

The University Computing Centre is independent of the teaching

departments, and provides a service to the whole university by

undertaking many kinds of numerical problems too complicated to

be handled by old-fashioned desk methods. It employs a full-time

and part-time staff of 18, and is equipped at present with a Royal-McBee LGP-30 electronic

computer which runs nearly 24 hours a day. This will shortly be replaced by a faster machine to

increase the problem-solving capacity of the Centre.

The LGP-30 and its manualsWe shall give only a brief description of the LGP-30 as it has been well documented in contemporary

and later papers which will be mentioned at the end of this section. The LGP-30 was 26 inches deep, 33

inches high and 44 inches long, and because of its size was sometimes referred to as a "desk computer". It

weighed 800 pounds, and was mounted on castors for easy moving. It contained 113 vacuum tubes and

1350 diodes. The tubes were mounted on etched circuit pluggable cards which contained associated

components. There was a total of 34 of these cards which were of 12 different types. The computer

consumed 1500 watts, and could be plugged into any standard 115 volt 60 cycle outlet. Air-conditioning

was not required if the room temperature could be kept within a reasonable range.

The main memory consisted of a magnetic drum with a capacity of 4096 thirty-two-bit words

arranged in sixty-four tracks of sixty-four sectors each with one word in a sector. There were three

circulating registers: the Accumulator Register for arithmetic operations, the Instruction Register for

holding the current instruction, and the Control Register which held the address of the next instruction to

be executed. Input and output was by means of a Flexowriter, an electric typewriter with a ten-character-

a-second paper tape reader and punch. The contents of these three registers could be viewed as binary

numbers on a small CRT display. The clock speed was 120 kilocycles giving addition and multiplication

times, inclusive of storage access, of 8750 and 24 000 microseconds, respectively. Recommended staff

for an eight-hour shift was one maintainer-operator and a part-time programmer. Approximately 500

LGP-30s were manufactured and sold.

The internal operation was binary so that all data had to be converted from decimal to binary on input

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and from binary to decimal on output. Numbers were assumed to be represented in fixed-point form and

be less than unity in absolute value. Negative numbers were represented as two's complements. The order

code consisted of sixteen one-address instructions. Programming was in machine language although a

compiler became available in about 1959.

There were very few reference manuals for the LGP-30. Indeed one user of the computer remarked

recently that he can't recall ever having seen a manual. There was a glossy illustrated printed Operations

Manual describing the LGP-30 logical structure, the console switches and auxiliary equipment. It had two

Appendices, the first a table entitled "Computer Codes on Typewriter Keyboard" and the second giving a

discussion of scaling and a carefully formatted table "Powers of Two" with the values of 2n and 2-n for

n = 1, 2, ..., 31. There were also a Programming Manual, Programming Class Notes, and a Subroutine

Manual Coding Sheets manual giving programs for input and other utility routines, and a set of floating-

point arithmetic routines. Published somewhat later than these manuals was a manual for an "algebraic

compiler and translator system" with the acronym ACT.

The Programming Manual consisted of fifty-six pages of typescript in a coil binding and was written

in understandable but somewhat unpolished prose. The introductory paragraph, entitled "What is

programming", contained the following interesting statements: "Programming the Royal Precision LGP-

30 is basically simple. Understanding certain problems requires certain knowledge, however

programming for the LGP-30 does not." (Many persons undoubtedly disputed these statements as they

read further.) A description of the structure and programming of the LGP-30 was preceded by a

discussion of organizing calculations on a hypothetical desk calculator. The remainder of the manual was

approximately evenly divided into sections on the structure of the computer, programming, number

systems including the scaling of fixed-point binary numbers, input-output procedures, and a summary of

the order code.

Three excellent papers on the LGP-30 published in 1956 and 1957 bear the name of Stanley Frankel.

(Frankel began his professional career at Los Alamos after completing a Ph.D. in physics at the

University of California in 1942, and was one of the persons overseeing the hand computing group and

later the IBM punched-card installation10,11. After the war he held a number of positions and from 1949 to

1954 was head of a digital computing group at the California Institute of Technology which was

responsible for the logical design of the MINAC computer which was subsequently licensed to

Librascope, Inc. and built and marketed as the LGP-30.) Frankel’s first paper gives a short introduction

to stored-program computers together with some discussion of the logical design of the LGP-3012. The

second gives a "substantially correct" and very thorough logical description of both the MINAC and the

LGP-30, and refers to the MINAC as a "breadboard model of a computer" of which the LGP-30 is the

production version13. The third paper, written by Frankel and James Cass, begins with an historical

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introduction to electronic computers and then describes the structure and programming of the LGP-30 and

ends with an efficient machine-language program for finding the sine of a given angle14. The abstract for

this last paper nicely reflects the newness of the subject of electronic computers:

Here it is - a clear and thorough introduction to the theory, design, philosophy, programming

and use of general-purpose digital computers - based on the new LGP-30. This is a much-needed

contribution to the literature of the computer field.

There are several other references to the LGP-30 giving specifications and statistics of use 15 and also

the logical design16, 17. There is also an excellent Web site with many links to many other relevant sites 18.

Finally there is the author's history of the Department of Computing at the University of Alberta which

has been consulted often in the preparation of the present paper19.

A course in programming the LGP-30We might mention a course which Bill Adams gave for the Faculty of Extension in January and

February of 1960 as it was the first computing course of any type given at the University of Alberta20. The

course consisted of twelve two-hour lectures given on consecutive Tuesday and Friday evenings. A brief

discussion of these lectures may show both how an introduction to programming has changed in forty

years and also how some of the principles have remained the same.

The course began with a brief description of the structure of the LGP-30 and its components.

Machine-language programming was then introduced and illustrated with a few simple problems such as

the computation of the area of an annular ring, moving a contiguous block of data from one part of

storage to another, polynomial evaluation, and Newton's method for finding square roots. There was

considerable discussion of number representation, conversion and scaling. Finally subroutines and

subroutine linkages and input-output operations were discussed.

Although the craft of programming has evolved and many programming languages have come and

gone in the forty years since this course was given, the approach to programming and learning to program

have in many ways remain unchanged. For example, on the second page of the notes we find the

following comment: "This course is intended as a practical course in programming and it is of great

importance that assignments should be done; otherwise nothing will be learned." An enumeration of the

steps required for the solution of a problem on a computer begins with a carefully written statement of the

problem, and continues through to test calculations, debugging, and, finally, "specifications" which is

underlined three times. Much in Bill's notes when read today shows the importance, and the difficulty, of

obtaining the correct balance between the details of a rapidly changing technology and the principles

underlying its effective application.

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Use of the LGP-30 at the University of AlbertaUniversity departments using the LGP-30 included Animal Science, Chemical Engineering,

Chemistry, Educational Psychology, Electrical Engineering, Entomology, Geology, Mathematics,

Physiology, Plant Science, Political Economy, Psychology, and Soil Science. It was also used by the

Alberta Research Council whose laboratories were on the campus. We shall limit our remarks to use by

the Department of Mathematics and the Computing Centre, and the Faculty of Agriculture except for one

final example from the Faculty of Engineering given at the end of the paper.

Until the Department of Computing Science was formed in 1964, M. Sc. degrees in computing were

awarded through the Department of Mathematics. The LGP-30 was used for the computations in some of

the theses which included the numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations, the

numerical solution of functional equations, and numerical integration. One person can remember that a

colleague in Calgary collected data on “miles of punched paper tape” which were transmitted to

Edmonton by teletype for processing.

We have already mentioned Brian Hocking’s study of the variations in marks and how the first part of

the calculations was done by hand and the final part on the LGP-30

when it became available. Beginning in 1958 analysis-of-variance

calculations in the Department of Soil Science were done on the

LGP-30 which replaced the manual methods used during the

previous two years as has been mentioned earlier. Listings of the

program and some of the results are still available, and a portion of

one is shown in the accompanying figure. Another study in the

Department of Soil Science on the effect of cropping systems and fertilizers on yields acknowledged the

usefulness of the LGP-30 for the analysis of the experimental results21.

Another example of the use of the LGP-30 is provided by a paper given by Fenton MacHardy of the

Department of Agricultural Engineering at Congrès International Technique du Machinisme Agricole

held in Paris in 196122. One of the examples given in the paper involved finding the optimal allocation of

tractor resources for preparing and planting a given area of land. Computationally the problem involved

the solution of a linear programming problem with ten variables including slack and surplus variables and

four constraints and required about two minutes on the LGP-30.

An LGP-30 simulator In order to run simple machine-language programs for the LGP-30 a simulator was written which

implemented the 16 machine-language instructions but had simplified input and output instructions

although the internal representation of instructions and data was still in binary. The simulator was written

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in J, which has been described as a modern dialect of APL. Readers unfamiliar with J may wish to visit

the J Software Web site at

www.jsoftware.com ,

or the author's J Page at

www.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Jpage/Jpage.html

which gives some introductory material on J as

well as the script file for the simulator. We shall

discuss here only two simple examples.

The first example is taken from Bill Adams'

lecture notes and involves the calculation of the

area of the annular ring between two concentric

circles of radii R and r. This area may be

calculated simply as (R2 - r2), or alternatively

(R + r)(R - r).

The annotated program is shown in the box. Its

execution on the simulator together with some

notes are as follows:

Tape1=: 0.12 0.1 0.314159

Memory 1

0 Load Ex1

0 Run Tape1

>FLEXOWRITER

0.0013823

The program is given as the 17-item list Ex1, the first few items of which are

+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+|i0000|h0017|i0000|h0018|i0000|h0019|...+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ .

A data tape is prepared with suitably scaled values for R = 1.2, r = 1 and . Since the program is

very short, only one 64-word track of drum memory is defined with addresses 0000, 0001, …, 0063.

The program is loaded in memory beginning at location 0, and is then executed with the given data

starting in location 0.Finally the computed area of the annular ring which has an unscaled value of

1.3823 is displayed .

The second example is from Frankel14 and gives a subroutine for finding the sine of an angle

expressed in "quadrants", i.e., units of 90 degrees. The subroutine which is not shown here had been

optimally coded and gave the sine to an accuracy of about eight decimal places. The time given in the

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0000 i0000 Read R0001 h0017 Hold R0002 i0000 Read r0003 h0018 Hold r0004 i0000 Read pi0005 h0019 Hold pi0006 b0017 Bring R0007 a0018 Add r0008 h0020 Hold R+r0009 b0017 Bring R0010 s0018 Subtract r0011 m0020 Multiply by R+r0012 h0021 Hold (R+r)(R-r)0013 m0019 Multiply by pi0014 h0022 Hold pi(R+r)(R-r)0015 p0000 Print0016 z0000 Stop

paper for the calculation was about 150 milliseconds. The subroutine was coded for the simulator together

with a small program for its use. The time taken for the simulated calculation using a 2.0 GHz PC was

about 6 milliseconds.

Phasing out the LGP-30

An article appearing in The Edmonton Journal on November 22, 1960 said that the University's

computer, which was referred to as a "30 computer", was being used twenty-four hours a day and seven

days a week. Furthermore, it stated that "the University expects shortly to launch an extensive computer

training program for students, and that arrangements are being made to obtain a faster unit for the newly

established centre". An additional LGP-30 was rented for a three-month period in August 1961 to meet

the demand from the Alberta Research Council. In May 1961 the University acquired an IBM 1620

which was intended initially primarily for research purposes. The LGP-30 was retained for teaching and

remained in use until the middle of 1963. Incidentally, the recommendation for the purchase of the IBM

1620 was the last official act of the Committee on Electronic Equipment which then ceased to function.

A Ph. D. thesis23 submitted in 1963 illustrates how the LGP-30 with its difficult machine-language

programming was being replaced by the IBM 1620 which could be programmed in Fortran. Both the

LGP-30 and the IBM 1620 were used in the thesis. The LGP-30 programs required a listing of 14 pages

and four pages of operating instructions and were used to process data collected on punched paper tape

which could be input directly into the LGP-30. On the other hand the listings of the two small Fortran

programs required only a page each.

Cited in the References to this thesis is McCracken’s A Guide to Fortran Programming published in

1961. This was the first of his many informative, well-written, attractively produced and relatively

inexpensive programming texts. What a contrast this book makes with many of the programming manuals

available at that time. Finally one cannot help but think how much better off would be today’s students if

present texts came up to the same high technical and literary standards set by Daniel McCracken.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the following persons for their help during the preparation of this paper: George

Ball, John Beamish, Don Bellow, Steve Hunka, Rob Lake, Fran Mather, John McDonald, June Panteluk,

Jim Robertson and Ken Walsh. I would also like to thank Peggy Kidwell, National Museum of Natural

History, Smithsonian Institution for kindly providing a number of LGP-30 manuals which were very

useful during the writing of the simulator.

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Edmonton, Alberta, 1961.

2. Keeping, E. S., A Short History of the Mathematics Department. Department of Mathematics,

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Book Company Inc., New York, 1971.

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18. Thelen, Ed., LGP-30. http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30.html, 2003.

19. Smillie, Keith, The Department of Computing Science: The first twenty-five years. Technical Report

TR 91-01, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, 1991. Also

available at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/about/history.php.

20. Adams, William S., LGP-30 Lectures. Unpublished lecture notes, 1960.

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diameter of aggregates of Breton plot soils," Canadian Journal of Plant Science, vol. 39, 1959, pp. 151 -

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Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, 1963.

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────Keith Smillie is Professor Emeritus of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta

T6G 2E8. His email address is smillie@cs.ualberta.ca.

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