Not the way you probably thought. I came across this article on Ars Technica. The old computers used for fire control on battleships were pure mechanical, and there's some darn clever work in them.
The article was good, but the movie made by the navy explaining how the functions worked was better - if you have most of an hour to kill.
Article: http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... the-waves/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
Wonder if anyone here has (or does) use any of these tricks?
I do know that when I worked for DEC in the very early 70's, that the Naval Academy still used analog computers (electronic) though they had moved to "transistorized" vs the older tube versions by then. (one of our members, Joe Sousa, runs the Philbrick archives) They just do some things better than digital, despite the snark comment on Ars that they could be replaced with an ardiuno. Not hardly, if you know your stuff, it's not even close.
Particularly in speed. To divide by a fixed ratio - two resistors, faster than any digital implementation, and no quantization at all - essentially infinite bitness. And an amplifier (which can have electrically controlled gain) = multiplier, again, can be VERY fast.
Tech is perhaps looking back at this using memristors as the coefficients in neural nets - more processing power/weight/power for NASA, it's been done already.