[jjoonathan]

Yes, in many circumstances it is advisable or necessary to perform calculations in front of the analog front end. Even the simplest "digital" transceiver amplifies and mixes before the AFE. However, I don't believe any of that is relevant to our criticism of the article, which focuses explicitly and extensively on performing calculations with cams, gears, and shafts at an "infinite level of resolution" and why the author thinks this is supposed to be better than digital computation:

> There are no least significant digits dropped, and answers are continuous rather than dependent on “for-next” clock-driven computing cycles.

Even if the article had talked about improving accuracy by skipping the digitizing step for gyroscopes, wind vanes, etc, his claim would not have been credible. It's not terribly difficult to digitize mechanical motion to the subatomic level (AFM is from the '80s) and many modern data sources (ring-laser gyroscopes, information acquired from remote ships and satellites) could not be coupled to the mechanical computer in a way that could be expected to beat digitization error.

A GPS chip likely has something to gain from correlating in front of the analog front end but a firing computer does not. You pay a fixed cost to go in and out of a digital representation, but with analog you keep paying for each calculation and, given that one of these firing computers weighed 3000lbs, I expect that this application saw digitization errors that were tiny next to calculation errors.

Thanks for being thorough, but I see your post as a tangental point rather than as a counterargument.