3 ms·
My dad's analogue computer ran the payroll at Raleigh Bicycles. They had an arrangement with Cadbury, who had the same machine, that if either broke down at wa
by PeachPlum 9y ago
My dad's analogue computer ran the payroll at Raleigh Bicycles.
They had an arrangement with Cadbury, who had the same machine, that if either broke down at wages time, operators could drive the 60miles and run the batch on the other's machine.
I find it interesting my family heritage is
Father - computer mechanic
Grandfather - machine maintenance at John Player Cigarettes
Great-Grandfather - machine maintenance at a Nottingham Lace factory
Me - computer programmer / analytics
- zokier 9y agoForgive my ignorance, but wouldn't payroll be particularly unsuitable domain for analog computing? There is very little that can be considered continuous in payroll, and on the other hand the exactness of values is very important?
- vidarh 9y agoYou can provide sufficient precision simply by scaling the values up until the level of precision you need (e.g. number of decimal points) is represented by big enough steps up/down in whatever medium is used to make the error rate low enough E.g. consider if you step on pair of analog bathroom scales and you only care about precision to the kg or lbs - you don't then need the scales to be exact. You just need their precision to be sufficiently big that the needle is sufficiently likely to be closest to the right kg to account for what error rate you're prepared to tolerate.
- PeachPlum 9y agomeaning electro mechanical
- tonmoy 9y agoSo the GGP is actually talking about a different kind of "analog" computer compared to what the article is talking about?