Two other apps for fluidics from the old days were nuclear reactors which are full of hyper-purified water and implantables in the body like maybe your internal

Two other apps for fluidics from the old days were nuclear reactors which are full of hyper-purified water and implantables in the body like maybe your internal insulin pump in the year 2050 would have an insulin dosing program written in fluid mechanics of blood powered by blood pressure. If we could just find a problem for the fluidics solution... Kinda like lasers in 1960, it works so now what do we do with it? The other interesting fluidics note is its been popular in hard sci fi for decades (well, for certain very small values of popular). The problem with fluidics is you need a pretty big digital computer to optimize the fluid mechanics and fancy digital computers to run the CNC machines to carve out the 3-d shapes. But if you could be VERY patient to do the calculations by hand and find a way to make the processors using 2-d photolithography maybe space aliens would have a fluidic technology. Another interesting note is this scales by size and speed of sound in liquid so its always going to be slower than photonics or electronics. But, the computational power to do "stuff" seems to scale on a power law so the invisible hand of cheapness means your smart thermostat for a hydronic hot water heating system would inevitably be fluidic in nature given an infinite number of years of market pressure. Yeah, a "big easy to mess with by hand" system is as slow as a pocket calculator, but we sold the world a heck of a lot of pocket calculators over the decades and if you shrink the dimensions by a million and increase pressure modestly and you could run a fluidic cell phone, perhaps.