alt Hacker NewsWhen I first learned about computer science at the age of 11 or so (and in 1982 or so) the first page of the text book put digital and analogue computers on what seemed to be an equal footing. And then proceeded to ignore the latter for the rest of the book. Apart from a few notable exceptions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine ) I've often wondered about analogue computing.
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At the end of my undergrad, I remember a UW professor being poached by intel to work on analogue computing research project, the chair of the department at the time said that it was an opportunity that might not ever happen again and he had to take. I don’t think it went anywhere (since I never heard of intel coming out with a product), but I at least knew there was an attempt.
Noise and component imprecision has always limited analog computing.