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Analog computer

An analog computer is a form of computer that uses electrical or mechanical phenomena


to model the problem being solved by using one kind of physical quantity to represent
another. The central concept among all analog computers can be better understood by
examining the definition of an analogy. The similarities of an analogy define the salient
characteristics of the comparison, but the differences in an analogy are also important.
Modeling a real physical system in a computer is called simulation.

Some examples:

• the abacus is a hand-operated digital computer (but not binary; it is biquinary)


• the slide rule is a hand-operated analog computer
• early gun directors used mechanical analog computers to direct gunnery fire

Limitations
In general, analog computers are limited by real, non-ideal effects. An analog signal is
composed of four basic components: DC and AC magnitudes, frequency, and phase. The
real limits of range on these characteristics limit analog computers. Some of these limits
include the noise floor, non-linearities and parasitic effects within semiconductor devices,
and the finite charge of an electron. Incidentally, for commercially available electronic
components, ranges of these aspects of input and output signals are always figures of
merit.

Analog computers, however, have been replaced by digital computers for almost all uses.
It may be stretching a point to regard some physical simulations such as wind tunnels as
analog computers, because the data so obtained must then also be scaled, for example, for
Reynolds number and Mach number. There is a point of view in physics based on
information processing which attempts to map the physical processes to computations.
Thus, from these points of view, the wind tunnel data gathering is either an experiment or
a computation.

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