ABSTRACT
The origins of electronic analogue computing lie in a tradition of computing by analogy that can be traced back to ancient times. However, though entirely consistent with this tradition, the origins of the post-World War II general-purpose electronic analogue computer do not lie in the major prewar analogue computing devices that are generally portrayed as its predecessors, namely the general-purpose mechanical differential analyzers and electrical network analyzers. As we have seen, the electronic analogue computer was not the product of a systematic, rational programme to progressively apply electronics to analogue computing devices already widely used by scientists and engineers as aids to computation and design. The electronic analogue computer did depend upon prior technology and techniques, but the origins of the key technology, the DC amplifier, lay not in analogue computing, but in the development of amplifiers for telecommunications and radio and automatic control applications. The process of enrolment and redefinition of thermionic-valve-based amplifiers as analogue computing components, which began in the late 1930s and 1940s, was largely independent of the major prewar centres of analogue computer development in academia, and was undertaken by different individuals for differen t purposes. Moreover, the commercial electronic analogue computer systems which emerged in the USA in the late 1940s and in Britain in the early 1950s were the product of industrial, rather than academic, research and development. Thus, the electronic analogue computer emerged as a concurrent alternative to the other major analogue as well as digital computers, rather than as a replacement for them.
