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The dry history of liquid computers (arxiv.org)
30 points by blopeur on Dec 9, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



There is one big omission in this article, which seems to focus mainly on hydrodynamic computing: "static" hydraulic computing, as implemented with relay valves --- and found major application as the control unit of passenger car automatic trnsmissions throughout much of the last century, before electronic controls became common. Examples:

http://cogpro.com/chapters/M-ThreeSpeedHydramatic/images/M%2...

http://oldcarblog.com/manuals/1970/1970%20Service%20Manual/1...



When I was a kid I used to make walking Lego models using Lego pneumatic elements and pneumatic logic to synchronize movement. My experiments eventually culminated in a (extremely slow) Rubik's cube manipulator which used a couple of first generation Mindstorm RCXs to "solve" the cube by reversing the shuffling stage.




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