Comment by bitwize

Reminds me of how I got into computing in the first place.

During the 1970s, my dad designed an engine, similar in principle to the Wiseman Engine: https://wisemanengine.com

To better explore and elucidate his ideas, he bought a TRS-80 Model 16 computer (Model II compatible) with high resolution graphics option and wrote a BASIC program that could compare the mechanical advantage graphs of several different engine mechanisms including his own. He had begun to add a visualization of the mechanism itself to the program. He had only completed the slider crank (what is used in most auto engines), but there it was, animated at half a frame a second: a wireframe drawing of a piston that moved up and down, pushing on a crank that turned the crankshaft. And my brain was like what manner of high wizardry is this!!

This site is exemplary of what I had glimpsed that day, going on 40 years ago: the power computers have to explain our world and bring alive the principles that drive it.