How many of you like HP41C calculators? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

20 Nov 2003

der Mouse wrote:
...
  ["Brian L. Stuart"
&lt;blstuart(a)bellsouth.net&gt;]
  Now here I do agree with the desire to define a
computer in terms of
 machines that can compute functions that are computable in a
 Church-Turing sense. 
 Hm, so you consider "analog computer" to be an oxymoron? 
Certainly not an oxymoron.  I have a real soft spot for analog
computers.  The theorist in me wants to hear the term analog
computer as a whole as describing a computing device in a different
class from the sort we've been discussing.  A part of me kind
of wishes a different term had been adopted for these machines,
but differential equation engine just doesn't have the same ring.

Now if I had just had a way to rescue the EIA hybrid machine I
used in college.  Of course, I'd have no place to put it, but
we can ignore minor details like that...

Brian L. Stuart