"The second approach was to use a digital computer to determine the solution. This solution was rejected because in 1963, a digital computer was expensive, slow, and less reliable."
This inflection point between analog and digital computer is a fascinating one. At one point in time a analog computer made sense and some later point in time you would be foolish to specify anything other than a digital computer. But that time between when it could go either way is interesting. There is a good autobiography by the person responsible for introducing the first digital computer to the navy that provides an interesting view into this era. https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...
Now I am vaguely searching for a guide on gear train schematic diagrams, I am sure they had them, you don't reason out something this complicated without one. I know hydraulics has it's own flavor of schematic diagram, which are fascinating if all you have seen are electronic circuits. https://www.hidraoil.com/technical-resources/hydraulic-symbo...
That is why I have doubts about their scalability. There are fundamental physics reasons we were able to scale digital computers and were unable to do the same to analog ones.
That's certainly true. But - the fastest possible machine to compute the sound of a guitar string reverberating in a concert hall is a guitar in a concert hall. The world itself does a tremendous amount of compute - the question is whether it is useful compute. I don't think this has been explored nearly enough.
Nonlin ar partial differential equations through a large continuum are expensive. Even if you can scale this particular example, it doesn't refute the point, the universe does a tremendous amount of compute that we don't know how to exploit.
I think it is totally possible for the computing to take non-zero time, but we observe it in zero-time as our consciousness only steps forward only with each iteration of computing the world state. So we observe zero time reality computations.
> No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO
That is the best title for a story about replacing analog and mechanical instruments with digital computers. A similar process is happening now with natural intelligence, replacing or augmenting the human intellect.
I said it because, the behavior of LLMs only appear to mimic intelligence only very superficially. Even without going "behind the curtain", and by only examining the behavior of LLMs slightly deeply, the illusion of this intelligent behavior break down.
Intelligent behavior need to be consistent. You need only a single instance of non-intelligent behavior to prove that an entity is not intelligent.
This is from the era of devices where the I/O was entirely electrical but the computation was mechanical. Most of this stuff came from naval gunnery. The naval "fire control tables" started out as mechanical computers where a rather large number of people were inputting different sensor readings via cranks and dials.[1] Gradually, more of the inputs came in directly from the sensors, and more of the outputs went directly to the gun turrets. The final form of this technology was units the size of a footlocker full of gears, cams, and resolvers, with all-electric inputs and outputs.
Such things used to show up in surplus stores.
I've seen the restored guidance computer for the Nike missile, at the site in Marin County.[2] That's similar, although ground-based. Analog data came in from radars, was processed with mechanical computation, and control signals went out to the missile.
Everytime I read articles like that, I envy the engineers that worked in development of such tools. First microprocessors in jet fighters, electromechanical celestial navigation...
Read every word. i liked this detail in the footnotes:
> The Astro Compass needed to know approximately where in the sky to find the star, in order to point its sensor in the right direction. The direction didn't need to be exact because the Astro Compass performed a spiral search pattern to find the star. This search pattern covered ±4° in bearing and ±2.5° in altitude. In comparison, the Moon is 0.5° wide, so it's a fairly large target area. ↩
> The Atro Tracker also has declination limits of +90° and -47° and a lower altitude limit of -6°. The latitude is limited to the range between -2° and +90°; the system automatically switches hemispheres so both the North and South latitudes are usable.
Why would the system need to have a much greater range of declination (celestial sphere) than latitude (Earth spheroid)? Because the Astro Tracker and Angle Computer could flip over to the Southern hemisphere (was this automatic or was there a switch?) having that much declination range seems unnecessary. Perhaps to allow for pitch of the aircraft in flight?
BTW, being able to operate in both the Northern & Southern hemispheres was an important capability for the B-52. Previous bombers (B-36 mostly) had the range but not the reliability or in-flight refueling for global reach.
Sadly, I didn't get the chance to look at the B-52 at the Museum of Flight when I was there. If you ever meet Charles Simonyi, please thank him for his support of the museum.
This is crazy impressive ... the kind of thing that should inspire one to do more, much more, than whatever "mere plumbing" one happens to be doing at the moment
> AI statement: I didn't use AI to write this article (details).
Meta, but thank you for including this and suggest even putting it at the top of your articles. I'm now off to bother to read something that someone bothered to write :)
> The Angle Computer is one piece of the Astro Compass, a system that locked onto a star and produced a highly accurate heading (i.e., compass direction), accurate to a tenth of a degree.
I think it provides ground track information not just heading? Which is far more valuable for aircraft navigation, because the main issue is unpredictable wind drift.
> The diagram below shows the guidance system of the Minuteman III missile (1970). This guidance system contains over 17,000 electronic and mechanical parts, costing $510,000 (about $4.5 million in current dollars). The heart of the guidance system is the gyro stabilized platform, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the missile's orientation and acceleration.
It's amazing, the things that can be done without what we would consider modern technology.
The 8-bit Guy recently released a video asking "What if everything still ran out vacuum tubes?" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEpnRM97ACQ>. Conclusion: A surprising amount of things we take for granted today would still be possible.
Reminds me a bit of this[0]. I have an iOS app[1] that models its operation. Sextants[2] are damn clever devices, and have been around for about three hundred years. Theodolites[3] are even older, but are used for terrestrial measurements.
Fun! I was just reading about the star tracker in "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed". Really fascinating when you're thinking about how this all happened in the 50's and 60's.
In a very similar vein, Ars Technica did a very interesting story on the electromechanical targeting computers on WW2 battle ships a few years ago; the instructional videos embedded in the story are gold.
Someone recreating this and allowing access to it sort of in the style of an escape room business would be pretty cool - motion flight sim where you can learn to fly the plane or learn to operate the other parts of engineer/bombing/navigation etc. And maybe not simulating the problematic "let's bomb human targets" but rather just bullseyes in fields.
113 comments
This inflection point between analog and digital computer is a fascinating one. At one point in time a analog computer made sense and some later point in time you would be foolish to specify anything other than a digital computer. But that time between when it could go either way is interesting. There is a good autobiography by the person responsible for introducing the first digital computer to the navy that provides an interesting view into this era. https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...
Now I am vaguely searching for a guide on gear train schematic diagrams, I am sure they had them, you don't reason out something this complicated without one. I know hydraulics has it's own flavor of schematic diagram, which are fascinating if all you have seen are electronic circuits. https://www.hidraoil.com/technical-resources/hydraulic-symbo...
Wouldn’t you be able to run a higher clock-speed simulation, and therefore compute the sound ahead-of-time, on a digital device?
But there is some hypothesis like MUH that sees reality as a sort of "recording" that we just experience.
>Why is it the fastest possible?
Why? because the "universe" takes zero time to compute it. In fact all of reality is computed in zero time. How can you beat it?
I think it is totally possible for the computing to take non-zero time, but we observe it in zero-time as our consciousness only steps forward only with each iteration of computing the world state. So we observe zero time reality computations.
> No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO
That is the best title for a story about replacing analog and mechanical instruments with digital computers. A similar process is happening now with natural intelligence, replacing or augmenting the human intellect.
An interesting resource I just found:
The analog computer museum - https://www.analogmuseum.org/english/
It has a Library section with lots of downloadable articles in German and English.
> A similar process is happening now with natural intelligence
LLMs are not AI.
I'm on your side, human comrade. No damn computer is going to tell me what to do!
Intelligent behavior need to be consistent. You need only a single instance of non-intelligent behavior to prove that an entity is not intelligent.
I've seen the restored guidance computer for the Nike missile, at the site in Marin County.[2] That's similar, although ground-based. Analog data came in from radars, was processed with mechanical computation, and control signals went out to the missile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_Fire_Control_Table
[2] https://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm
And here I am fighting gitlab pipelines.
> The Astro Compass needed to know approximately where in the sky to find the star, in order to point its sensor in the right direction. The direction didn't need to be exact because the Astro Compass performed a spiral search pattern to find the star. This search pattern covered ±4° in bearing and ±2.5° in altitude. In comparison, the Moon is 0.5° wide, so it's a fairly large target area. ↩
> The Atro Tracker also has declination limits of +90° and -47° and a lower altitude limit of -6°. The latitude is limited to the range between -2° and +90°; the system automatically switches hemispheres so both the North and South latitudes are usable.
Why would the system need to have a much greater range of declination (celestial sphere) than latitude (Earth spheroid)? Because the Astro Tracker and Angle Computer could flip over to the Southern hemisphere (was this automatic or was there a switch?) having that much declination range seems unnecessary. Perhaps to allow for pitch of the aircraft in flight?
BTW, being able to operate in both the Northern & Southern hemispheres was an important capability for the B-52. Previous bombers (B-36 mostly) had the range but not the reliability or in-flight refueling for global reach.
Sadly, I didn't get the chance to look at the B-52 at the Museum of Flight when I was there. If you ever meet Charles Simonyi, please thank him for his support of the museum.
> Each knob on the Master Control Panel has a different geometrical shape, allowing the user to distinguish the knobs by feel.
Auto manufacturers should take a clue here.
> AI statement: I didn't use AI to write this article (details).
Meta, but thank you for including this and suggest even putting it at the top of your articles. I'm now off to bother to read something that someone bothered to write :)
> The Angle Computer is one piece of the Astro Compass, a system that locked onto a star and produced a highly accurate heading (i.e., compass direction), accurate to a tenth of a degree.
I think it provides ground track information not just heading? Which is far more valuable for aircraft navigation, because the main issue is unpredictable wind drift.
> The diagram below shows the guidance system of the Minuteman III missile (1970). This guidance system contains over 17,000 electronic and mechanical parts, costing $510,000 (about $4.5 million in current dollars). The heart of the guidance system is the gyro stabilized platform, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the missile's orientation and acceleration.
The 8-bit Guy recently released a video asking "What if everything still ran out vacuum tubes?" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEpnRM97ACQ>. Conclusion: A surprising amount of things we take for granted today would still be possible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id989574753
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextant
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
1. https://www.rbogash.com/B-52/Carls_Letter.html
The angle computers were removed from the H models in the early to mid 1990s and I doubt they added them back.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/gears...
https://youtu.be/UV1V9-nnaAs