Not sure if possible, but I've found the idea of building a general-purpose fluidics machine fascinating. This might solve the problem in (1).
I do agree with (2) though - I think anything macroscale would simple be orders of magnitude slower than what we can archieve at microscale. I don't know if there is any way out of this.
> I think anything macroscale would simple be orders of magnitude slower than what we can archieve at microscale. I don't know if there is any way out of this.
This is what I was wondering about.
A general-purpose computer, abierto how slow, is still a computer that can process huge amount of computation. Back in the 19th century, the availability of many mathematical and engineering tables was still a problem. And in 1920s, to calculate the requirements of the Afsluitdijk dam project in the Netherlands, the famed physicist Lorentz helped deriving a model from basic fluid dynamics, and it took several years to run the "computer simulation" - to calculate the differential equations in that model numerically by a team of human computers.
Lorentz said,
> The numerical calculations were so lengthy, that we came close to the ultimate limit of what can be done in this way. I myself had no part in this. I did try once or twice to set up and work out such a calculation, but then it would turn out that I had made a mistake, so that it had to be done all over again by others.
As it has been pointed out, Analytical Engine was a real possibility and unlike the Differential Engine, it was genuinely Turing-complete (I thought it was just a numerical solver, and believed Bruce Sterling's Sci-Fi was a bit exaggeration). Just imagine how the course of history would change if some military or industrial funding in the 18th century went to build such a computer instead...
I do agree with (2) though - I think anything macroscale would simple be orders of magnitude slower than what we can archieve at microscale. I don't know if there is any way out of this.