
MONIAC – Monetary National Income Analogue Computer - slater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
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trevyn
In action:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg)

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alephnerd
If you think the MONIAC is interesting, it’s creator was also an interesting
character.

Bill Phillips - is easily the most badass economist/mathematician to have
lived in the 20th century.

He worked as a crocodile hunter and cinema manager in ANZAC and later moved to
China during the Sino-Japanese War, but had to escape via the Soviet Union
during the height of the Stalinist purges. Yet immediately after that he ended
up joining the RAF and being posted in Singapore, which was then invaded by
the Japanese, and he ended up being sent to a POW camp after being caught
after trying to escape via Indonesia. During his time in the POW camp, he
learnt Chinese, jerryrigged a secret water boiler for tea, and built a secret
radio. Following WW2 he was then made an OBE due to his exploits in SEA.

As if that wasn’t enough, he went back to school to study maths and Econ at
LSE and ended up developing the epynomeous Phillips Curve that is the backbone
of macroeconomics (and his coauthor won a Nobel for it since Phillip died
before the recognition).

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fredley
Allan McRobie at the The University of Cambridge has a restored, working one
of these, and gets it out and demos it sometimes. It's fascinating, and well
worth watching all the way through:

[https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1094078](https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1094078)

Unlike the shorter 3 minute demos on YouTube, this is a full lecture into the
history, construction and mathematics behind the machine!

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macintux
I assume it’s not a coincidence that this and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18846599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18846599)
arrived on HN a couple of hours apart.

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qubex
When I was a teenager in the mid 1990s I saw this at the Science Museum in
London and modelled it in Mathematica.

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bschne
If anyone is in London, one of these is also on display in the "Mathematics"
Gallery at the Science Museum - along with some other very interesting
devices.

