Run Your Vehicles On Water (HHO)

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I believe that an early form of Bosch fuel injection (D-jet? maybe? whatever was used on the early 914/4, anyway) used an analog engine "computer." Just to take this thread on another diverging tangent...

nate

nate

None of them were water powered, at least ;>)

Fluidics computers started coming into use a good bit later, and I have always wondered if they might not be a better answer to some automotive systems than electronic units, mainly due to possible lower failures.

Ah! I did get to play with analog computers at one time- late sixties. After a couple of years they were replaced as digital models got faster and larger. Our analog was a pretty big cabinet full of stuff, as big as some of the smaller digitals around then. But it was one of the more powerful units. This was at McDonnell Douglas. We were simulating advanced radar systems. Slow- took forever to simulate a few seconds of real time operation. I forget what the time scaling was, but as I say we only ran a few pulses at a time. I really liked using those things, though. Nobody talks about them anymore. They sure had a short lifetime!

Look on the web for, Geniac Computers

I think they date back to the 1950s. cuhulin

Analogue computing systems lasted well into the early eighties in various disguises, mostly for control systems rather than for doing batch calculations. EAI was making hybrid digitally-controlled-analogue computers much longer than you'd ever expect.

But if you want to see a work of art, open up the fuel injection control unit in a 1972 Volvo. It really is a special-purpose analogue computer, with gain blocks, differential and integration stages, and pulse forming networks all made with op-amps and discrete components. There must be a hundred potentiometer adjustments inside there too. Some guy in Sweden probably knows what they all do; everyone else is afraid to touch them.

--scott

Enigma was hardly a "computer" and it was electrical, rather than mechanical. Colossus, part of the attempts to break those codes, was the first truly electronic programable digital computer.

If you want sophisticated digital computers built out of mechanical logic, look at Victorian railway signalling interlock.

Early, electronic, but non-programmable (in the sense we use the term now). It was more like a fast calculator than a decision-maker..

I have only seen pictures of Enigma.. Thought they were mechanical. It was, if I understand correctly, just a coding/decoding apparatus, but I considered it a simple single purpose computer.

Enigma was strictly a combinational device. Colossus was an iterative device, but not really programmable.

The bombes that the US Navy built using the Colossus model are worth looking at; the NSA museum in Maryland has one of them and it uses gas-filled thyratrons for actual logic devices. They're very slow by Eniac standards, but they're faster than the mechanical stuff that fed them.

Today when we say "computer" we mean a finite automaton (ie. a Turing machine with a fixed length tape). It loads an instruction from memory, decodes the instruction, and does something to memory given the contents of the instruction, which includes the ability to change the program counter (that indicates where the next instruction is) conditionally.

I think the first "computer" by that definition was the Harvard Mark I relay computer in the late 1930s. However, a modern programmer would have a hard time with it since it used different storage for program and data.

(On the other hand, the 8048 and 8051 microcontrollers that you will see in ECUs of the eighties also were Harvard-class machines with seperate memories.)

Eniac was a full finite automaton. It could fetch, decode, and execute. It was goofy in a lot of ways and it also had split instruction and data storage, but it was the real thing and it didn't use any mechanical components, just tubes. This made it MUCH faster.

--scott

As far as I can tell, the only electrical thing about Enigma was the wire paths that sent power to the light bulbs. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's true, but that doesn't make the electrical part any less important.

--scott

Dingley said it was "electrical, rather than mechanical". I had to protest that it was mainly mechanical.

It could have been made without any electrical parts, presumably, but the readout would have been massively complicated or really user-unfriendly.

That is what I thought too, but am amicable to being corrected in this case.

In last hour's Mythbusters on tv, Jamie and Adam tried out some ''fuel saver'' gadgets.They didn't work at all.

What P.T.Barnum said. cuhulin

that's a repeat, and yup, they don't work.

I believe that the electrolysis setup test pretty much confirms what everyone's been saying in this thread all along. Don't know why I didn't think of that episode when this thread started.

nate

The lock that keeps your spare key inaccessible from your teenager works very well. Also the anti-siphon gas cap.

But I have a very effective fuel saver gadget. It's called a "tire pressure gauge."

--scott

I pay more attention when Kari Byron is working on a project ;>)