Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing

Abstract

The chapter discusses why the venerable words analog and digital were appropriated by inventors of the numerical computer for different types of computers in the United States in the 1940s, what alternatives were proposed, how they became paired keywords, why closure occurred so quickly in the United States (by 1950), and the different ways in which digital and analog engineering cultures interpreted the terms in the 1950s and 1960s, and speculates why the concerns raised at the 1950 Macy conference on cybernetics, and also by a couple of other computer engineers, that the terms were vague and that analog was not the logical opposite of digital were ignored.