5 May
1998
5 May
'98
12:48 p.m.
Philip.Belben(a)powertech.co.uk wrote:
But in general, I agree with you both - analogue
computers are often
small, simple and embedded, and they're a heck of a lot more common than
Back before the Beatles broke up, I read a novel appropriate to my age
at the time (I was slumming), one of the "Danny Dunn" series by Jay
Williams, that very reasonably explained a household thermostat (one
of the old style bi-metallic element types) as a simple computer. The
book was probably titled _Danny Dunn and the Thinking Machine_, though
at the moment I'm too tired to do the simple Web search that would
verify (waitaminit, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is
bookmarked -- part is broken, they're remodeling again -- there it is)
_Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_ by Jay Williams and Raymond
Abrashkin, published in 1958, not that long after digital won out over
analog in the practical computing arena. At the time, I still owned a
"DigiComp I" mechanical digital computer made out of plastic -- and I'd
_love_ to own one again.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_