OP here - my original idea was that in the mid-late 1800s we could have had binary computers made from telegraph relays as switches, not solid-state transistors

OP here - my original idea was that in the mid-late 1800s we could have had binary computers made from telegraph relays as switches, not solid-state transistors. The relays I believe are still many orders of magnitude more reliable than vacuum tubes, and probably easier to make more reliable for large-scale provisioning.