Mechanical Computers
Back in the dark ages, transistors weren’t around to do computations for us—but sometimes complicated math needed to be done in real-time, pencil and paper was too slow, and vacuum tubes were too big, power intensive, and fragile. With a little bit of gearing, math, a whole lot of genius, the Navy solved their problem of computing how to shoot at a target.
Fortunately, the Navy also documented the process so they could teach themselves. The videos take their time with explanations, some old-school video overlays, and lots of examples. For a quick peek, the video below is a superb example of using similar triangles to compute continuous multiplication.
Via Boing Boing.
Posted by carneywilson on May. 20, 2010