From Analog to Digital and Back

Bits are the new electrons. The nature of analog computing is to take control.

NASA engineer operating Analog Computing Machine in the Fuel Systems Building at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, Cleveland, Ohio, September 28, 1949. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 70-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” joined Peter the Great, the 44-year-old tsar of Russia, in taking the cure at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, drinking mineral…