{"id":5289,"date":"2004-06-06T08:50:49","date_gmt":"2004-06-06T16:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/06\/5289\/"},"modified":"2004-06-06T08:50:49","modified_gmt":"2004-06-06T16:50:49","slug":"mit-differential-analyzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/?p=5289","title":{"rendered":"MIT Differential Analyzer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I remember seeing pictures of this thing in newsreels&#8230; not on their original screenings of course.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<blockquote><p>The Differential Analyzer was MIT&#8217;s first computer, built by Vannevar Bush and his students in the early 1930s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It looks like a table full of car transmission parts&#8230; a long glass-covered table with rods running along its length.  It is entirely analog- values are stored by positions of rotating gears; there are no cams or ratchets that I remember.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p>The user interface is a graph- to input values the operator moves a stylus arm to different points on a graph, and the machine outputs another graph.<\/p>\n<p>  Web link of note: <a HREF='http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/mindell\/www\/analyzer.htm'>MIT Differential Analyzer<\/a><br \/>\n(At http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/mindell\/www\/analyzer.htm)<\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I remember seeing pictures of this thing in newsreels&#8230; not on their original screenings of course. The Differential Analyzer was MIT&#8217;s first computer, built by Vannevar Bush and his students in the early 1930s. It looks like a table full of car transmission parts&#8230; a long glass-covered table with rods running along its length. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}