Here is an interesting article I ran across, talking about new designs for mechanical computers for use is high stress situations where normal computers can’t quite take the abuse.  Kind of interesting how the pendulum seems to be swinging back now.  I have seen this many times over the years, where one technology fades out in favor of another, only for it to come back in one form or another in the future.

One example (in my opinion anyway) would be mainframes that got replaced by minis, and commodity servers.  These are now getting consolidated and replaced by virtual servers, which is one big server or many servers that act as one to run all of the virtual servers.  Isn’t that pretty much what mainframes did?  Aah, the cycle continues!