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An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computation machine (computer) that uses physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities behaving according to the mathematical principles in question (analog signals) to model the problem being solved.
A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries , if not millennia , the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century.
A documentary, The World's First Computer, was produced in 2012 by the Antikythera mechanism researcher and film-maker Tony Freeth. [100] In 2012, BBC Four aired The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer; [101] it was also aired on 3 April 2013 in the United States on NOVA, the PBS science series, under the name Ancient Computer. [102]
Built around the beginning of the 1st century BCE, the Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known analog computer in human history, and there’s an enduring mystery surrounding what it was used for.
A fully electronic analog computer was built by Helmut Hölzer in 1942 at Peenemünde Army Research Center. [ 66 ] [ 67 ] [ 68 ] By the 1950s the success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but hybrid analog computers , controlled by digital electronics, remained in substantial use into the ...
The Navitimer circular rule, referred to by Breitling as a "navigation computer", featured airspeed, rate/time of climb/descent, flight time, distance, and fuel consumption functions, as well as kilometer—nautical mile and gallon—liter fuel amount conversion functions.
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
The general purpose analog computer (GPAC) is a mathematical model of analog computers first introduced in 1941 by Claude Shannon. [1] This model consists of circuits where several basic units are interconnected in order to compute some function. The GPAC can be implemented in practice through the use of mechanical devices or analog electronics.