[jacquesm]

Sure, just like a sloppy slide-rule or mechanical calipers or micrometer will give you iffy readings. Whether the accuracy change is a material one depends on what you are doing. Daisy chaining results would get you into meaningless territory quite fast I would imagine.

[analog31]

Oddly enough, I have a circular slide rule where the printed scale is not quite concentric with the sliding discs, so the thing has a built-in periodic error.

[jacquesm]

Username checks out ;) That's neat, I've never had one of those but used a linear one for years for quick order-of-magnitude answers. I got to use it just as modern pocket calculators took off, the first ones were only four function jobs and they were priced insanely high so slide rules were more economic for the kind of problems I ran into in highschool. My maths book even had a whole chapter on using them. Then; after a few years I got a Ti-57 and that was that for the sliderule, that thing was programmable.

[daniel-cussen]

Not unlike the way floating point rounding errors accumulate, in fact. The only difference is you can mitigate those to a degree by increasing the digits of precision, whereas that can't really be done on a mechanical computer.

[asmithmd1]

You do that by increasing the physical size of the components

[jacquesm]

Continent size analog computer. Would be interesting to see if it would outperform IEEE doubles.