[perl4ever]

There are concepts of electronic computers that involve streaming data in a vaguely similar way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array

An early example of this (an electronic computer in the 1940s!) seems to have been:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[agumonkey]

Yes most analog "computers" were time ordered / streaming.

Hollerith and discrete calculating machines were more about unordered data analysis. Static batch of input, chunk it the way you want, forward, backward.. doesn't matter. Very freeing in a way. I can understand why digital computation wiped the market, no noise and no constraint.. how nice. Until it starts to produce spaghetti bowls and crawling insects.