On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:37:00 -0700, rbowman wrote:

On 02/08/2018 10:23 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:10:18 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the
teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX
Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)

Wouldn't those be more correctly called industrial calculators?

Not really.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/srw.htm

There's a calculator... it could do square roots with nothing but
gears, cams, springs, and electric motors. It would also happily try to
divide by zero until you unplugged it.

The Mk13 time of flight computer in the Mk26 fire control system was a
spring wound cam and gear machine. You had a key that you wound it up
with like an old alarm clock.