11 sats \ 0 replies \ @bartoli 5 Aug \ on: What Is Analog Computing? science
Even the early electronics where quite différent.
I have had to replace the 'logic' that drove the electric motors of a drilling rig built only 35 years ago. About a hundred of buttons and seniors came, as as many wires, 24v or 0v for 1 or 0, in 4 electrical cabinets, each bigger that a fridge. In there, there where hundreds of big old relais, doing all the AND, OR, NOT, boolean operations to combine all those conditions
All this for 4 motors.
We replaced it by a simple industrial PLC, about the size of à computer, smaller that just the terminals the connect all the inbound and outbound signals.
It was fun retro engineering the logical conditions from the relay wiring, then rewriting them