"Oddball"(LGP-30)

The guy that desined the LGP-30 architecture was indeed truly a genius. His name was Stanley Frankel. He was a physicist, but was extremely well-versed in almost all of the sciences. Frankel was a key member of the team of folks that worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the A-Bomb. His understanding of nuclear physics, as well as extremely complex math, lent itself to Frankel being a prime mover in developing the algorithm for the "computers" (people with desktop mechanical calculators who would get a slip of paper with a problem to solve, which they would do with the calculator, then record the result, and pass the paper on) that "ran" the nuclear diffusion calculations for the folks designing the bomb. The "computers" were slow, and sometimes made mistakes. Frankel, along with some other team members, came up with ways of making the calculations cross-checked by others, so that the chance for error was minimized. It was essnetially like programming a computer is today, yet it's all done with paper, pencil, people, and mechanical calculators. Later, to speed up the process, an IBM Card Programmed Calculator (essentially an electronic math unit that was programmed with plugboards, and used punched cards for input and output) helped speed up the process, and again, Frankel was a major force in developing the algorithms to make the calculations possible on this machine. After the Manhattan Project ended, Frankel did consulting work. It is during this time that he developed some computer designs. One of his designs was for the architecutre of what became the LGP-30. He presentated a paper on his design (which was indeed extremely elegant and efficient), and attracted the interest of folks with Royal McBee (later acsuired by General Precision, then Librascope), and a deal was cut for Royal McBee to license the design for creation of an actual computer, which became the LGP-30. Frankel worked closely with the engineers to come up with the working design of the LGP-30, a machine that utilized a magnetic drum for main storage, large arrays of diode-resistor gating, and a relatively small number of vacuum tubes for flip flops, buffering, and drive circuitry. Later, Frankel ended up doing early electronic calculator design. He developed the design of what became the Smith Corona/Marchant Cogito 240 and Cogito 240SR calculators, which were all-transistor, bit-serial calculating machines that utilized a magnetostrictive delay line for register memory, and an oscilloscope-type CRT tube to display results in vector-generated digits. Smith Corona Marchant had an OEM marketing agreement with Diehl Calculating Machine Co., in West Germany. Diehl was very successful in the mechanical calculating machine marketplace, designing desktop electro-mechanical calculators that were both extremely fast, and virtually bulletproof. Frankel had designed a small-scale microprogrammed logic engine in his home office (he called it Nic-Nac), as a personal project. The idea was to make this "programmable logic engine" the core architecture for a calculator. The folks at Diehl were looking for a way to break into the blossoming electronic calculator market, and learned of Frankel's idea through Frankel's work with SCM on the Cogito 240/240SR. Diehl licensed the architecture that Frankel had designed. Frankel, and his son, Allan, would travel to Diehl's plant to help them with turning the microprogrammed concept into a working calculator. A somewhat improved version of Nic-Nac was built in Germany, which was then used as the development test-bed for what became the Diehl Combitron calculator. The Combitron was Diehl's first all-electronic calculator, and it was indeed a microprogrammed machine. It had a roll of punched metal tape that contained the microcode for the machine. The Combitron used two magnetostrictive delay lines as memory, one which would be loaded with the microcode at power-up (from the punched metal tape), and another that contained the working registers of the calculator. This generalized architecture allowed the calculator to have a very low component count for a complete desktop printing electronic calculator with memory registers and square root. A later revision, the Combitron S, added facilities for additional stroage which allowed the machine to be user-programmable by "learning" calculator operations into memory from the keyboard. The Combitron S was picked up by SCM because of their OEM agreement with Diehl, and marketed by SCM as the SCM 566PR. Frankel received royalties for every Diehl Combitron, Combitron S, and SCM 566PM that were made. Just thought that perhaps some background on the genius of Stan Frankel, and his contribution to electronic computing, may be of interest. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Web Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com