[TheForge] Re: Price of steel & scrap

Sat Apr 3 08:36:01 2004

I've only ever seen two analog computers. One was sitting in the hallway 
at Lockheed in Palo Alto, CA in 1980. The other was in use at Northern 
Natural Gas's research facility in Omaha, Nebraska about . Lockheed used 
it (used to use it) for missle flight calculations. Northern used it to 
simulate gas pipelines, the differential equations that model what 
happens when you put a pump with a beat on the end of a resonant 
pipeline. This allowed them to build the pipeline such that it wouldn't 
tear itself apart from resonances. I spent a lot of time talking with 
the PhD who ran it (I had a summer job with far too little to do).

I'd be surprised if a market could be found for new analog computers. 
They take a whole lot more understanding of the hardware to run than a 
digital one does, much more overhead.

Steve Smith
an analog EE who still has plenty of market for his skills.

[email protected] wrote:
> In a message dated 4/2/2004 8:54:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
> [email protected] writes:
> I think we have quite a capacity for
> rebounding from the nonsense the bean-counters lead us into.  Takes
> common sense, though.  Think of it as a business opportunity...

> I'm curious, Bruce...is there currently a market for analog computers?
> 
> Philip Whitley
> 
> 
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