Engineering Memory of the Month

A hep new computer

Back in 1953, if you were struggling to solve a non-linear ordinary differential equation, you couldn’t just whip out a $119 TI-89 calculator and be done with it. The alternative to pencil and paper and a slide rule was an analog computer. The 6-year-old transistor technology of the time hadn’t quite been applied to computing yet.

Eagerly seeking solutions, Stanford invested more than $10,000 in an analog computer for the engineering mechanics lab. The computer was delivered in January 1953, 55 years ago this month.

"The Stanford analog computer is an assemblage of DC amplifiers, function multipliers, function generators, and a group of precision resistors and capacitors," said the Stanford Engineering News of the day. "By means of problem boards and plug-in leads, these units may be interconnected to perform a variety of mathematical operations."

The output was a curve, either displayed on a screen or plotted on paper. And it was just about the same size as then research associate Allen Peterson, as shown in the accompanying picture.

Now that was a machine with jets, Daddy-O.

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