The computers were developed in the 1950s as joint ventures between Librascope / General Precision Equipment and the Royal McBee Corporation (under whose name the computers were sold). The Royal McBee LGP-30 is pretty much forgotton these days but in it's day was a rather notable small (by the standards of the day) computer mainly used for scientific purposes. It was the size of a desk and included a console typewriter (no screens though you could add a printer). The computer pre-dated the microchip era of course, instead it used vacuum tubes and diodes. It also had a magnetic drum for memory (a hardware quirk of which Mel famously took advantage of). The drum gave the LGP-30 4K of 32-bit words of memory. The LGP-30 did not have RAM like a modern computer and only ran at 120kHz (kilohertz not megahertz) however it was fast enough to perform up to four hundred calculations per second.
The LGP-30 had a number of notable users, including the metrologist Edward Lorenz who used it to model weather patterns. His work on the computer, howing how small differences in data could lead to large differences in forecast led him to develop the butterfly effect and chaos theory.
