When I was an under graduate at UNSW in the early ’60s I used a slide rule as my main calculator for engineering problems. I had no idea until recently that I was in the analog world. By the second half of the 60’s I was carting around boxes of punch cards for my post graduate work. The idea of the digital world was not front of mind. I’ve discovered that engineers don’t think about the foundations of mathematics, they just use the best tools available at the time.

I’ve just finished reading Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson and was fascinated by the battle between mathematicians and engineers to develop the first digital computer a decade earlier in the 50’s.

Von Neumann( mathematician) and Bigelow( engineer) as the senior members of a team at Princeton Uni in the USA managed to build the first digital computer against the odds. I was the beneficiary in 1970 when I was running large transient flow models for natural gas transmission on a UNIVAC 1108 machine in Sydney.

I only mention this because Freeman’s book opened my eyes to a whole new world of the computer in 2020.

Analog vs Digital has become the topic of the day. We hear about quantum computing but nobody says where it fits ( it’s analog). We have traversed a great circle from analog to digital and back again, in 70 years. In truth the future will be a mix of the two but you have to learn about the strengths of each to take maximum benefit.

Rahul Sarpeshkar gives a great talk on TedX on Analog Supercomputers https://youtu.be/ZycidN_GYo0