Fun and Fundamentals of Electronics: The Analog Renaissance
In the early 1950s, aircraft development created an urgent need for simulations, and analog computers were perfectly suited to run flight simulators.
Digital computers barely existed at that time, but the dynamics of airplanes could be modeled by the flow of electric current through potentiometers, amplifiers, and capacitors. These circuits were analogous to the real world, and so they became known as analog computers.
You could describe almost any aspect of aircraft performance with differential equations, and the terms of those equations were represented by daisy chaining analog modules using patch cords on a breakout board. This created a tremendous tangle of wires, but once you get the hang of it, output to an oscilloscope display was immediate, with no processing or programming required. Figure 
In 1963, analog computing was still being used to create a cockpit simulation of a space vehicle docked in orbit. But microchips promised greater accuracy with far less maintenance, and they got cheaper. By the mid-1970s, analog was obsolete.
Where was it?
In 2020, Professor Doctor Bernd Ulmann co-founded Anabrid GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, to develop analog chip computers. The company also launched an educational product named The Analog Thing, abbreviated as That. Digital computers running complex simulations had become increasingly power-hungry and plagued by issues such as heat dissipation, prompting Ulmann and his colleagues to foresee a new role for analog. p>
THAT is now available to buyers in the United States for less than $350 including shipping (see Figure B 
In the early 1950s, aircraft development created an urgent need for simulations, and analog computers were perfectly suited to run flight simulators.
Digital computers barely existed at that time, but the dynamics of airplanes could be modeled by the flow of electric current through potentiometers, amplifiers, and capacitors. These circuits were analogous to the real world, and so they became known as analog computers.
You could describe almost any aspect of aircraft performance with differential equations, and the terms of those equations were represented by daisy chaining analog modules using patch cords on a breakout board. This created a tremendous tangle of wires, but once you get the hang of it, output to an oscilloscope display was immediate, with no processing or programming required. Figure
In 1963, analog computing was still being used to create a cockpit simulation of a space vehicle docked in orbit. But microchips promised greater accuracy with far less maintenance, and they got cheaper. By the mid-1970s, analog was obsolete.
Where was it?
In 2020, Professor Doctor Bernd Ulmann co-founded Anabrid GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, to develop analog chip computers. The company also launched an educational product named The Analog Thing, abbreviated as That. Digital computers running complex simulations had become increasingly power-hungry and plagued by issues such as heat dissipation, prompting Ulmann and his colleagues to foresee a new role for analog. p>
THAT is now available to buyers in the United States for less than $350 including shipping (see Figure B
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