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Object

Royal McBee LGP-30

A vintage Royal McBee LGP-30 computer, featuring a clock, control panel, and keyboard, stands against a dark background.

A desk-sized vacuum-tube computer sold from 1956 by the Royal McBee Corporation, with 4,096 words of magnetic-drum memory and a clock measured in kilohertz. It cost around $47,000. Lorenz's 1961 weather model ran on one for hours to produce a few simulated months. The machine carried six decimal digits of internal precision but printed only three: the gap in which chaos was hiding.

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