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What Is Analog Computing?
You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.
Among the earliest known analog computers is the Antikythera mechanism from ancient Greece, which used dozens of gears to predict eclipses and calculate the positions of the sun and moon. And in the late 19th century, William Thomson, who later became Lord Kelvin, designed a machine that used shafts, cranks and pulleys to model the influence of celestial bodies on the tides. In an analog computer that uses electrical signals — not gears and pulleys — a current could pass through a circuit that uses carefully chosen resistors to model those operations, at a significant power savings.
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