From digital to analog and back: the ideology of intelligent machines in the history of the electrical analyzer, 1870s-1960s

摘要

The example of the electrical analyzer, a genre of computing artifacts known mainly by their development and use in the context of electrification, is treated as representative of the historical oscillation between analog and digital computing orientations. Artificial electric lines, short-circuit calculating boards, and alternating current network analyzers are discussed as examples of electrical analyzers. Counting on the successful employment of the ideology of intelligent machines in the context of the history of the electrical analyzer, the first part of the article searches for a direct ancestor of the post-World War II computing ideology. The second part of the article proposes to interpret the ideology of intelligent machines as an effect related to the social conditions of the appropriation of computing labor. Overall, the article argues about the historical, i.e., antiessentialist, character of the demarcation of digital from analog orientation.