The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of

I'm absolutely fascinated by these old mechanical computers. There was no software back then to design them, the device was designed within someone's imagination. Truly incredible.

Chris from "Clickspring" is building an Antikytherean mechanism and has been building it using period tools and techniques to the best of the experts knowledge...the ww1/2 analog firing computers are still incredibly advanced and smartly built tbh. They are just insanely accurate for as little input as they take and what they can interpret and output for solutions

My mom used to work on an analog computer in the 1940's. She worked in a comptometer office when they got this "new machine." She never called it a computer but as She described it my mouth nearly dropped. I was in college learning programming at the time and we had recently gone over the history of computing. She said it had a bunch of wires and plugs and dials and flashing lights. Her boss couldn't figure it out so he gave her the manual to figure it out.

As a US Navy reactor operator of 60s-era nuke submarines, I am recalling that subs had a large number of analog computers, from bow to stern, so to speak. In my own training for my specialty, we were told of magnetic amplifiers (mag-amps) used in German gun directors, that still worked perfectly after being recovered from sunken ships. Part of my work was checking and correcting as needed, the micrometer settings of certain variable circuit components in a particular analog computer that was absolutely vital to the operation of a nuclear submarine engineering plant. In the meantime, we did manual calculations with a slide rule and graphs, to determine when the reactor should go critical. (all of these submarines were turned into razor blades decades ago, so no useful classified information is in this remark)

When I was learning to be an engineer back in the early '70s, analog computers were on the way out the door. Large-scale integration was beginning, and Moore's Law was a new concept that my professor's predicted was going to revolutionize computers. Fifty years later I am retired after a career in digital computing, and now I find that analog is making a comeback. I am looking forward to part 2; I know enough about analog computer that I can anticipate some of the application for which they will be useful. I suspect the improvements in electronics, and perhaps even 3D printing of components will produce new and sophisticated analog machines. Makes me wish I was 20 again, so I could have a second career in analog! Please keep making these videos - you are doing valuable work. 👍

As a total software person I find these mechanical devices so fascinating and clever. Those people coming up with them were geniuses.

I used and helped develop analog computers in 1960's and early 70's. Gun aiming analog mechanical computers used gears and wheels . It considered ship vector and speed and distance to target. The disk/ball mechanism for integration mentioned were also part of it. Electronic ones used tube then transistor operational amplifiers with resistor input and feedback for aritmatic plus capacitor feedback for calculus anf special diode networks in input for trig. And so on. Moon landing simulator we made combined analog (to "think" ) and digitals with control for in/ out. Civil engineers and auto companies used analog pc's to optimize suspensions and roadside slope grading. Plotters as large as beds drew plans and curves far more accurate than primitive digitals. I used m9 in USAF.

I dropped out of school, regrettably, but whenever I find your channel while scrolling, I always seem to pay more attention than I did in school. You've taught me more than most of the people who were paid to teach me, and for that I appreciate you V, keep up the good work!

The ball and disk integrator actually blew my mind. I cannot believe such a thing has existed and I only ever heard about it now. What a beautiful machine.

I exclaimed at my TV when you showed the rotary ball integrator. What a beautiful system!

I’m always amazed at how these guys were able to figure this stuff out so long ago. I had a hard enough time trying to understanding FFT and Laplace transform in my engineering classes today and I still feel like I don’t have a good hold.

I was a field engineer for Electronics Associates Inc., the largest manufacturer of analog computers in the 60's and 70's. I traveled all over, but the last year was at NASA Ames. Among other things, the navigation 8-ball used in the Apollo program was developed on our computers. They were state of the art at time time. We later combined them with digital computers. The complex computations were handled with ease on the analog portion and the raw number crunching was done on the digital computer. All together we had around 15 large scale analog computers on site at NASA Ames filling entire rooms and involved in all aspects of their various missions from spaceflight to life science studies. Analog computers speak to engineers in their language--mathematics. Digital computers require interpretation between languages.

It's so crazy how adding or multiplying sine waves, something that's as simple as punching values into a calculator today, used to require some unbelievable engineering. I mean, just the notion of such an advanced mechanical computer makes my head hurt. The things we do today would be seen as magic many years ago. Great video!

This presentation, on this channel, may be my all-time favorite. As a software engineer, I am blown away and humbled by the innovations of people like Lord Kelvin. I absolutely loved the organization and flow of this presentation.

What a great talk. I remember hearing a story about analog computers for use in naval gunnery; they were used to keep the guns level at the target in rolling seas. When they tried to replace them with digital computers they found the digital computers were too slow to compensate for the movement of the ship, and had to go back to analog controls. It took a couple of decades of digital computer development before the digital computers were fast enough to replace the analog ones.

This video made me remember the clocktowers of Neal Stephensons Anathem. Still a favourite book.

This was astoundingly relevant to--almost a summary of--my History of Science: The Digital Age course, for which I have a final for tomorrow. This video is practically a 'further reading' section. Thank you for this.

4:15 It's pretty mind boggling that a telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic ocean in the 1850's. I'd love to learn the details of that endeavor someday.

Excellent presentation. When I was doing my aerospace masters in 1981, I had a project to simulate an unstable combat aircraft and then to add the effect of an active control system to stabilise and control it. This was all analogue using potentiometers and amplifiers. The reason was that analogue computers have the immediate response needed to bring a dynamically unstable systems under control without introducing nuisance and limit cycle oscillations. All artificial stability systems for aircraft at the time had an active end built as an analogue computer, even if the pilot input end was still digital. It was a very powerful lesson. As my tutor observed, in general with digital systems you can have fast or you can have powerful. With analogue computing, it's possible to make the sensor the source of power (as in aerodynamic servo tabs, the BAe146 regional jet has an entirely analogue pitch control system involving a devious concoction of pneumatic, aerodynamic and inertial devices), the result can be both fast (=responsive) and powerful.

Amazing how much effort is put into your videos be it the history, working and structure behind complex machinery, the animations, editing and the list goes on....