BACK TO THE ANALOG FUTURE

COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN DIGITAL FOR HALF A CENTURY, WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO RESURRECT THE CLUNKERS OF YESTERYEAR?

- CHARLES PLATT

WHEN OLD TECH DIES, it usually stays dead. No one expects rotary phones or adding machines to come crawling back from oblivion. Floppy diskettes, VHS tapes, cathode-ray tubes-they shall rest in peace. Likewise, we won't see old analog computers in data centers anytime soon. They were monstrous beasts: difficult to program, expensive to maintain, and limited in accuracy. ¶ Or so I thought. Then I came across this confounding statement: Bringing back analog computers in much more advanced forms than their historic ancestors will change the world of computing drastically and forever. ¶ Seriously? I found the prediction in the preface of a handsome illustrated book titled, simply, Analog Computing. Reissued in 2022, it was written by the German mathematician Bernd Ulmann-who seemed very serious indeed. ¶ I've been writing about future tech since before wIRED existed and have written six books explaining electronics. I used to develop my own software, and some of my friends design hardware. I'd never heard anyone say anything about analog, so why would Ulmann imagine that this very dead paradigm could be resurrected? And with such far-reaching and permanent consequences? ¶ I felt compelled to investigate further.

FOR AN EXAMPLE of how digital has displaced analog, look at photography. In a pre-digital camera, continuous variations in light created chemical reactions on a piece of film, where an image appeared as a representation-an analogue of reality. In a modern camera, by contrast, the light variations are converted to digital values. These are processed by the camera's CPU before being saved as a stream of ls and Os with digital compression, if you wish.

Engineers began using the word analog in the 1940s (shortened from analogue; they like compression) to refer to computers that simulated real-world conditions. But mechanical devices had been doing much the same thing for centuries.