[so-and-so]

Very interesting device. But it costs as much as an office PC, that can emulate this analog computer and do a lot more.

[orbital-decay]

It's an educational board. I made a custom educational board for my kid a few years back (with a 16 bit digital CPU though) just to have something physical, with the possibility to be underclocked to extreme values and a bunch of LEDs in key points to illustrate the principle. I could have used an emulator, but something like that is 1000x better as it's bare metal and doesn't have any black magic under the hood.

[shagie]

When it was originally released it was a bit less expensive than the current price on it (glad I got one then).

https://web.archive.org/web/20220528131517/https://shop.anab...

[qubex]

A digital computer cannot emulate an analog computer: it can only simulate it to an arbitrary level of precision. That’s the whole point.

[dmos62]

The difference between the words emulate and simulate are difficult to grasp for me. One comes from the latin `aemulus` and the other from `similis`. One talks about imitation and the other about similarity. When people discuss the differences between these terms, they say things like one aims to be able to replace a thing, while the other aims to replicate the thing's internal state. Or, that one aims to replicate the external behaviour, and the other aims to replicate the internal state.

I somewhat discard these interpretations. My conclusion, is that emulation is about making something equal to something else under some circumstance, while simulation is about approaching emulation (under some circumstance), but not aiming or achieving complete emulation (under that circumstance). Basically, the difference between becoming equal and becoming similar. This is counter to popular usage I think, but popular usage is a bit of a mess, in my opinion.

[mjhay]

Analog computers don't have infinite precision due to the presence of noise, so digital computers can emulate that with high-enough precision arithmetic.

[samstave]

What was that application from a long time ago that had analog wiring sound systems that you had to manually (on screen) connect a wire between ports... and you could flip the rack from front to back?

--

One of my best friends growing up built a ton of analog mixers IRL while working at Melekko Heavy Industries... (I helped him a tiny bit create the CAD files for the CNC for the faceplates.)

[shultays]

Sure you can, you only need to simulate it to near some orders around the planck constant. And then you can go even further. Analog does not have infinite precision either

[mjhay]

That's much less cool though.