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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Peggy Kidwell, curator emerita at the Smithsonian, on a strange feature of the modern museum: the most used computer in the room is the one in your pocket.
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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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Clive England of cray-history.net on the bet behind Cray supercomputing: breadth over depth, many simulations over one perfect answer.
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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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Bernd Ulmann: an analog program is a spaghetti of wires that turns the machine into a model behaving just like the problem you want to solve.
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