Bloody awful things. I’ve built a few simple analogue PID loops and simple analogue computers over the years and it’s an art and a half. I think the biggest pai

Bloody awful things. I’ve built a few simple analogue PID loops and simple analogue computers over the years and it’s an art and a half. I think the biggest pain I had was before the availability of reasonably stable log converters was trying to use matched transistor pairs to perform log operations. Took three days to work out where an error was creeping in and it was from the thermal offset voltage of the buffer opamp input. The circuit was drifting due to my desk lamp warming it up. The IC was out of spec on drift too! :( I did succeed in producing a four quadrant multiplier in the end but required some unholy things to be done. That and noise and the cost of precision make it almost useless compared to a digital computer now. The rise of direct sampling SDRs confirms this. Crazy dynamic range, excellent noise floor and hardly any analogue up front.