The Hand That Counts: From Knots to Baudot, The Forgotten Systems of Analog Thought
Our dominant technological paradigm, the digital, is built on a foundation of discrete binary values. It's a system of presence and absence, of 1s and 0s. From the findings and researches of the Hangar, the very first computers were not digital at all, and used analog technologies to get through. Their designs were not born from silicon, they came out of human hand itself.
Take a look at the now rarely used principle of material memory. With it, the physical object itself ibecomes a computational device of its own111. The Incan quipu, a system of knotted cords, was far more than a simple record-keeping tool2. It was a sophisticated system whose three-dimensional arrangement encoded complex, multi-variable data3. Similarly, Native American tribes used wampum belts as a sophisticated system for recording complex treaties and historical records through bead arrangements4. These were not just mnemonic devices; they were physical information systems5.
Such a notion of physical encoding resonates with a suppressed branch of computational theory that proposed information could be processed through continuous analog systems rather than discrete digital ones6. The idea is not that these cultures were "primitive," in our research, It has shown that they had developed sophisticated "cross-cultural information systems" that were rooted in the tactile world7777.
