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by nine_k 912 days ago
In analog computers, software is hard to separate from the hardware. In ones I had any experience with (as a part of a university course), the programming part was wiring things on patch panels, not unlike how you do it with modular analog synths. You could make the same machine run a really wide variety of analog calculations by connecting opamps and passive components in various ways.

If we could optimize a set of programs down to the FPGA bitstream or even Verilog level, that would approach the kind of programs analog computers run.

I can't tell anything about Turing completeness though. It's a fully discrete concept, and analog computers operate in the continuous signal domain.