Speaking of analog, when was this Lovely Rita Meter Made?* 
Speaking of digital, the first commercial digital watch was made by Hamilton and sold in 1972 for over $2,000. It used LEDs and you had to push a button to light up the time. I first saw one in a James Bond movie (Roger Moore, but I forget which one), and immediately thought it was the coolest thing. The first LCD digital watches sold for $100 or more. A year later you could buy one for $10 or less. I recall when digital watches were so ubiquitous some people said their grandchildren wouldn't understand what "clockwise" meant. That's silly. We still say "roll down the window" when we push a button in the car. Concepts like "clockwise" don't disappear easily.
I rarely see a digital watch anymore, do you? Analog watches came back in style quickly after the brief popularity of digital watches faded.
All this to say that analog is making a comeback. There are recent predictions that analog computing devices will be in millions of devices by 2030. Maybe. I don't know. But here's the reasoning: "Alexa, turn on the bedroom light" causes your Amazon echo to do an analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion before it can understand what you said. And when Alexa replies, your Echo does a digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion to make Alexa speak. Digital computing devices rely heavily on A/D and D/A, and each process uses energy. An analog CPU wouldn't need A/D or D/A conversion, saving energy. Supposedly your ROKU remote batteries would last years longer, assuming you use frequently the "speak what you want to watch" feature.
Somehow, I don't think those power-saving benefits will drive the analog computing industry. Those are personal devices. We plug Alexa into the wall wart and are used to buying remote batteries. On a grand scale, though, eliminating A/D and D/A in computing might save megawatts of energy, depending on what that computing is doing. So they say. And the speculation is that analog-based AI computing will be far more efficient, since it won't waste as much time moving bits back and forth between CPU and memory. We think in analog, so why not design AI to do so, too?
Personally, I think we're stuck with digital for the foreseeable future. If anything, I think any analog computing in products we buy in our lifetime will be a hybrid of analog and digital. But that's just me. What do you think?
*You'll have to be old or familiar with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album to get that.
