The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of

Why HN readers recommended it

Recommended in threads on analog computing, photonic chips, AI hardware and tide prediction as an engaging history of Kelvin's machines.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Veritasium

Topic

analog computers

Format

explainer

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

6

HN mentions in dataset

14

Recommendation years in dataset

2021–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break …

• You might be interested in the analog computers that were used to compute tide tables back in the day. It's quite fascinating how they even managed to do basic Fourier transforms without electricity: [VIDEO]

• basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its …