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Analogue Computers | 428 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Analogue Computers
Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, June 19 2013 @ 01:54 AM EDT
There used to be a market for electronic analogue computers. Burr-Brown made
(and still makes) Operational Amplifiers with low DC drift and adjustable
offsets so that the amplifier shortfall from the perfect amplifier of DC
voltages and currents could be mitigated against. We happily throw together
audio amplifiers using op. amps like the old 706 and 741 ICs, forgetting that
they were originally analogue computing and control devices.

These computer modules were an analogue to the digital patchboard programmed
computer in that the interconnection of the modules constituted the programming.
Both are general purpose computers.

The same applies to the hydraulic computer: the programming was in the plumbing,
the size of the reservoirs and the setting of the valves.

When searching for digital electronic computers to assess for general-purpose...
ishness, assemblies of logic circuits to create a Boolean logic, special purpose
circuit should be disregarded.

There are few interface and peripheral logic circuits that cannot more
efficiently be replaced with general purpose embedded controllers. Keyboard
controllers, display controllers, USB port controllers and so on. However,
dedicated keyboard controllers should not be confused with a non-general-purpose
computing device. It is a complex, boolean logic circuit that does not compute.
Even an Arithmetic Logic Unit created from logic elements (as used in all
microprocessors) is not a computer in its own right.

The device must have a computing architecture such as the von Neumann
architecture. IIRC, even Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) have a general purpose
computer architecture at their heart.

I am in the camp that maintains that there are no digital computers, embedded or
not, that are not general purpose computer machines using the Turing principle.
They may have waggle-able pins, but this does not deny the general
purpose-ishness of the computer at their heart.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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