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Before Turing Machines, computability theory, and computational complexity theory, there were computers. They were people: mostly women. This is one of my favorite photos of a computer, because it shows her using two distinct computing methods.

One is digital: using numbers, represented by their digits (the adding machine and graph paper she's using). This is how we ordinarily represent numbers, and how we compute with them (e.g., elementary addition, using least significant digits first, then next-most-significant, etc.).

Both methods have been used for millennia, and both have been mechanized. Computing machines were once primarily analog, but now they're almost exclusively digital; we just call those machines computers now. Importantly, they're both real types of computation, although it's easy to forget.

Why? Because Turing (and others) were interested only in digital computation, or "effective procedures" when it came to studying what is "computable." They didn't mean computable by *any* device: they meant to capture "computable by hand, following simple rules, without cleverness or instruments."

But the mathematical theory of digital computation became extremely interesting and useful, and became synonymous with *all* computation. Coupled with analog computing machines being replaced by digital ones, analog computation has been largely dismissed.