Comments by "Anthony Flack" (@AnthonyFlack) on "Old pinball machines are amazingly complex" video.

It's not that the complexity is all that great, it's that we're used to seeing these same tasks performed by tiny solid-state electronics and crystal oscillators, not relays and spinning cams. The innards of this pinball machine resemble the inner workings of a simple microchip, laid out as a human-scale contraption. You can see how it was that we were able to bootstrap ourselves from mechanical engineering to computer science, and how Ada Lovelace could conceive the first computer programs a century before the first computers.
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