RETRO COMPUTING AHEAD OF ITS TIME

Although analog computers were poised to be the future, by the 1960s the computing world had switched to a digital model.

Amiga Workbench had two ways of navigating between desktops. The first was with keyboard shortcuts, where you could drop back to the main workbench and launch more apps. But it was the second method that is truly uncanny.

Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton started the project after seeing an alarming drop in coding proficiency with university applicants. With an extremely cheap machine, it was the foundation’s intention to get children coding again, the way 8-bit microcomputers started bedroom coding in the 80s. The default

Unlike their digital counterparts, analog computers use physical means to make calculations, such as pulleys, cogs, electricity, or hydraulics—read-outs are usually on dials or gauges. As such, one needs to allow for physical tolerances and a certain amount of error correction, meaning that analog computers can’t be relied on to return the same precise values repeatedly.

Amigas could “screen drag” by holding down the Amiga button while clicking and dragging the mouse. Whatever screen was on display would be pulled down to reveal whatever desktop or app was behind it. A button called a “depth gadget” could put desktops or apps ahead or behind each other.

Raspberry Pi OS comes loaded with programming languages, environments, and interpreters, though there has always been a focus on Python— perhaps the best modern equivalent of BASIC. GPIO pins are displayed, making the machines perfect for hardware hacking.

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IN THE 2020S, Our CPU speeds are measured in gigahertz. Our RAM size is measured in gigabytes. Our machines are thousands of times faster than when home computing started. It’s easy to look at how far computing has progressed and be smug. But is it possible that we think we’ve progressed further than we really have?

But analog computing will never really disappear. If you’ve ever used a slide rule, this is a simple form of analog computing, and hybrid analog-digital systems are still used in areas like aircraft navigation.

This looks cool now, but was absolute witchcraft in the 80s, and looks amazing when multi-tasking with full-screen video. And, due to a hardware quirk, the Amiga didn’t care what resolution each app used, and could switch between them at will— something not even modern computers can do.

Try watching old episodes of The Computer Chronicles or The Computer Programme (BBC, UK) and it can be very surprising to see what they could do with technology of the past—computers that were thousands of times slower than what we have now, or just entirely different. From analog and mechanical computing, to early inter-planetary digital photography; from early multimedia, to an internet before the internet—history is full of technological sophistication, largely driven by methodologies that have fallen out of favor.

A big advantage in analog computing is that it side-steps the digital world’s need for computing power, as long as someone can design a system to suit.

Join us as we look back through computing history at accomplishments that seem almost impossible for the tech of the day. We’ll look at computing before the modern digital age, 20thcentury technology ahead of its time, and a special look at the most tech-mad decade of all: The 80s.