by Rich Washburn
Okay, so here's the weird part. We're going *back* to analog computing. Yeah—*analog*. Not like, vinyl-is-cool-again retro vibes. I mean real, voltage-is-the-math, knobs-and-curves analog. And it's not nostalgia. It's because... well, we kind of *have to*. We’ve hit a wall with digital. The chips are hot, the power draw is stupid, and AI models are turning data centers into low-orbit suns. Moore’s Law? Pretty much wheezing on the side of the road, asking for electrolytes. So now, analog’s peeking its head back around the corner like, “Hey, remember me?” And honestly? It’s kind of brilliant. Think about it. Digital computing is all about binary. Ones and zeroes. Flip-flop gates. Clocks. It’s a dance routine with very strict choreography. But the world doesn’t work that way. The world is *messy*. Signals are messy. Reality is an analog waveform, not a tidy boolean. Analog computers? They just ride the waveform. They don’t have to simulate it. They *are* it. You set voltages, you let it run, and it becomes the answer. You don’t even wait for output—it’s already mid-process. It’s almost unsettling how *fast* and *cheap* analog can be—especially compared to digital systems trying to brute-force the same problem with millions of clock cycles. And here's the kicker: this isn’t theoretical. It’s happening. Companies are building analog chips right now—hybrids, really—that take the efficiency of analog and merge it with the control logic of digital. These things can do edge AI with practically no power budget. Like, battery-powered brain cells on silicon. It’s wild. Some of them are doing audio recognition or signal classification *without even waking up the main processor*. That’s not just efficient. That’s *dangerous in a cool way*. It’s the kind of tech shift that doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like a glitch in the timeline. Like we looped around. What’s especially crazy is that we’re not doing this because we miss the good ol’ days. Nobody’s sitting around going, “man, I wish I could carry a 60-pound fire control calculator in my backpack.” We’re doing this because **analog solves problems** digital is struggling with. We’re doing this because signal flow is starting to beat clock cycles. We’re doing this because reality doesn’t snap to grid. So yeah, digital’s not going anywhere. It’s great at a ton of things. But we’re at this weird, beautiful point in tech where the stuff we left behind in the ‘60s is starting to look like a good idea *again*. And honestly? That feels kind of perfect. >_ C:\RETRO\RW> `RUN /ANALOG_REBOOT.EXE` *signal locked. solutions incoming.*