The patch panel is the iconic image of an analog computer: a board of wires you rewire for each problem. Bernd Ulmann, who builds and restores these machines, makes the case for leaving it behind, and shows the reconfigurable computer he built without one.
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George Dyson, historian of technology: as we build an essentially unlimited amount of digital processing, more of our computing ends up resting on continuous functions. Analog is back, whether we like it or not.
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#OTD in #ComputingHistory in 1954, the first successful FORTRAN program was executed.

Developed at IBM by a team led by John Backus, FORTRAN was designed to make programming scientific and engineering problems easier.

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David Alan Grier on the 1946 Moore School lectures: the people building digital computers treated analog as the old style, and most of them wanted to set it aside entirely to focus the money and attention on the stored program digital computer.
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Bernd Ulmann, who builds analog computers, predicts that within twenty years they will sit inside nearly every machine as co-processors, about as routinely as graphics cards do now, handling AI and differential equations alongside the digital computer.
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