Axes mentioned in this post: * analog vs digital (I've never understood this one) * centralized vs distributed * fixed vs fluid (seems ill-posed) * controlling vs collaborating (author needs to read his Ivan Illich) * momentary vs long-lasting * peek-into vs be-inside (wish the word 'environment' wasn't already taken) * consuming vs authoring

Radar charts are neat especially when (though it isn't usually the case) the area has some meaning. I feel the first time I saw them was to graph Transformer stats, as in the toys, in the '80s. In that case the area was significant: a measure of the Transformer's overall power.

I guess we all know the proper engineering definition of analog and digital. The confusion comes from people incorrectly using "analog" as a synonym for "primitive" or "antiquated".

Early computing devices were “analog”

Wrong. The abacus is digital. (Although the slide rule is analog.)

for example, Charles Babbage’s difference engine

Wrong. The difference engine is digital, as were later mechanical and electro-mechanical calculators. The Difference Engine #1 was designed to operate on 20 digit decimal numbers, and you can't get that level of accuracy from an analog computer.

Likewise, the telegraph was analog.

Wrong again. The telegraph quantizes line voltages into two levels, on and off, and it quantizes the duration of square wave impulses into two durations, "dit" and "dah" (short and long). The Analytical Engine (1837) was the first programmable, general purpose, Turing-complete computer. It was digital, and I think it had to be digital. I've never heard of a general purpose, programmable analog computer, only special purpose machines for performing specific calculations. I don't think analog "computers" are in the same category, so I don't think that the analog/digital axis is really relevant to the rest of the post.

If I recall, part of the difference engine's cycle specifically tries to recenter digit gears so that they drift out of place.