I stumbled on something strange yesterday. Buried in dusty engineering textbooks. A forgotten world. Analog computing.
We threw it away. All of it. In our mad digital rush. But what if we were wrong?
Analog hits different. It’s like nature’s math. Digital breaks everything into tiny steps - a dotted line tracking a baseball’s path. Analog just flows with it. No steps, no approximations. Just smooth, natural movement. Like water finding its path.
The story reads like some tech thriller. Lord Kelvin predicting tides in 1872. Vannevar Bush’s steampunk Differential Analyzer in 1931. Project Typhoon designing aircraft in 1949. All without a single line of code.
Why care now? Our modern tech is hitting walls. Energy walls. Speed walls. Design walls.
Analog might break us through. Circuits using 1000x less power. Sensors that process as naturally as breathing. AI that thinks more like brains than calculators.
Real-time is different in analog. No waiting for digital conversions. Responses faster than you can say “real-time.” Control systems that react like human reflexes, not computer programs.
I keep thinking about AI. Our brains aren’t digital. They’re messy, beautiful, analog systems. Maybe our AI shouldn’t be purely digital either. Something that sips power instead of chugging it. Processing in parallel because nature doesn’t do things one at a time.
The comeback is happening. Scientists solving differential equations like simple arithmetic. Sound processing smooth as butter. AI accelerators that think more like brains. Quantum computing where analog and digital dance together.
The magic happens at the intersection. One foot in the past, one in the future:
class HybridProcessor:
def __init__(self):
# One foot in the past, one in the future
self.analog_frontend = AnalogPreprocessor()
self.digital_backend = DigitalProcessor()
def process_signal(self, input_signal):
# Let analog do what it does best
preprocessed = self.analog_frontend.filter(input_signal)
# Digital precision for the finish line
return self.digital_backend.compute(preprocessed)
It’s not all perfect. Components drift like bad car alignment. Temperature sensitivity like chocolate in summer. Manufacturing that makes rocket science look simple. Getting analog and digital to work together without fighting.
What blows my mind - analog computing is just nature doing math. A planet’s orbit? That’s a gravitational equation being solved in real-time. No code required. A mechanical differential analyzer just copied nature’s homework.
I’m betting on systems that blend analog grace with digital precision. Brain-like computers that barely need power. Edge devices that run forever. Sensors that understand the world like we do.
I built a simple integrator circuit yesterday. Just a resistor, capacitor, and op-amp. But it’s like a mathematical time machine:
Simple analog integrator
V1 in 0 SIN(0 1 1)
XU1 in out vdd vss out TL082
R1 in out 10k
C1 out 0 1u
.end
Maybe the best way forward is to take a step back. Look at what we left behind. Analog computing isn’t some curiosity - it might be exactly what we need for tomorrow’s problems.
The future isn’t about choosing digital or analog. It’s finding the sweet spot where they work together. Analog’s natural grace with digital’s precision.
Like cooking - sometimes you need exact measurements (digital), sometimes you need to go by feel (analog). The best chefs know when to use each approach.
I’m still exploring this world between worlds. Something tells me it holds answers we’ve been searching for.