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The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of

Veritasium · 13.7M views · 2021-12-21 · 20:13

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Overview

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

On Hacker News

Recommended in threads on analog computing, photonic chips, AI hardware and tide prediction as an engaging history of Kelvin's machines.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

History of computingMechanical & precision engineering
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analog computingkelvintide predictorantikythera

What people said

jodrellblank · 2022-03 · Strong recommendation

In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break them down into ten individual sine waves, then combining those sine waves back together to predict future tides. And built analog computers to do all the involved integration, multiplying and summing. It's a part of the history of computing I'd never heard of, despite hearing quite a lot about the dawn of electro-mechanical computers in the early 1900s. [1] [VIDEO]

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o4c · 2025-12 · Recommendation

Veritasium made a great video on Kelvin's Tide-predicting machine in 2021. Title: The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of URL: [VIDEO]

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nico · 2024-06 · Recommendation

There is a very good Veritasium video that talks about analog computers and Lord Kelvin’s tide prediction machine: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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