Analog computers
- The history of engineering is interesting and it teaches us a lot about how we design stuff.
Motivation
- I’m not a software engineer, not by far. I’m more of a self taught programmer, like many other of my colleagues who got to learn how to use computers efficiently just to survive mechanical engineering school.
- Indeed I think I am part of a strange generation, that was born when computers where already wide spread with their graphical user interfaces, but were not on the hands of everyone in the form of smartphones. This means that my first approach to computation happened through shiny Windows that framed my idea of what a computer is capable of: just what you see in the buttons on the screen.
- It may seem silly indeed, but it wasn’t before engineering school that I finally discovered how simple it is to code and how many possibilities this opens up just in terms of usage of this marvelous machine that is a computer!
- This discovery brought along another realization: me, and probably many people like me, know really little about computation. I have the impression we just don’t have a sense of the fact that computers are just what the name says: computing machines.
- Since the moment of this realization I got super-interested in computing machines, and I don’t mean just modern digital computers, but all kind of computing machines.
Graphical methods for mechanical calculations
- Mohr’s circles are an intimidating topic in strength of materials classes and arguably not a very practical tool for modern engineers, because we just don’t need them that much anymore. This is a great example of an old computing machine, it’s just a graph on paper but it represents complex equations and it can be used to compute results that would be quite more difficult to get analytically.
Paper computers
- Chris Staecker channel on youtube is one of my favorite, he surely deserves more public attention then what he got. Chris is a mathematician and in his videos he frequently speaks about old forgotten computing machines, starting from interesting graphs of the kind of Mohr’s circles, to real full fledged computers… on paper!
- Der Know How
- The Instructo Paper Computer
- The Little Man Computer I find the concept quite fascinating, paper computers are simply tables with names associated to the boxes and a set of instructions on how to move information around, the backbone of a CPU!
Useful lessons I learned
- This is quite different from the rest of the articles on this website, but I wanted to spend a few words on the subject and express my idea that everyone should be exposed to computing machines for what they are: not wizardry, but a masterpiece of human civilization leveraging simple principles that can be drawn on paper, just on a fantastic scale.
