An artist named John Whitney made the world's first computer motion graphics in the 1950s using an analog computer that was converted from a WWII anti-aircraft gun control system. The results looked like this:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/TbV7loKp69s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/TbV7loKp69s</a><p>In the 1960s IBM hired him to work on digital computer animation concepts, and he gave up on the analog system. But it's interesting how the technical complexity of the work dipped for years while he had to wait for IBM's general-purpose digital systems to catch up with the capabilities of the analog computer setup.
Linking the manual:
<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7h4vPhh2vD2SlY1OUdmNkFGRzQ/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7h4vPhh2vD2SlY1OUdmNkFGRzQ...</a>
Sadly only in german.
His entire site is really quite interesting, almost strange that I never stumbled over it (given a large overlap of interests).<p>Thanks for posting this!
Very cool project!<p>"I am quite desperately looking for an EPROM programmer capable of reading and writing 2708 type EPROMs since I am afraid that the 2708 EPROMs on this board will loose their contents - the are already about 20 years old."<p>It's not very hard to build your own programmer/verifier (reader) ... if you can't find schematics then message me. But this is <i></i>very<i></i> important. Those EPROMs are are erased by shining UV light through the window in the package ... get some UV opaque material over those windows immediately and stop leaving them in the light.<p>In the mean-time, I'll dig around in my basement and see if I still have the correct programmer for that part (I vaguely remember using it to restore my COSMAC ELF to operation).
I used EAI's analog computers when getting my EE bachelors degree. It was quite interesting, we even had a hybrid model that the professors were scratching their heads to make it work, but the purely analog was great to simulate integrals and such.