It's interesting that you note the unreliability. I always assumed tubes were unreliable, but thought anything solid state (even those card based systems) would be "reliable enough" to start taking for granted.

But then you look at it and think Yeah, obviously they're not going to have MTBF times in the millions. It's going to be hundreds of hours - once a week, or maybe every few weeks between real hard crashes.

How would that change your behaviour.

My understanding the surprising factor that settled the debate for analog vs digital computers. was that digital computers require far less precise electronics. the voltage in an analog computer has to be exactly 5.2648 volts, every resister, capacitor, transistor has to be a high precision part, the more complex the computer the higher precision required. while in a digital computer "close to 5 volts" is good enough. this makes the components cheaper, more reliable and smaller. and as such the digital computer won.

This is why I have my doubts about existing designs for quantum computers, the quantum algorithms we are trying to solve in hardware require an analog design and we rejected analog computers before, mainly because they were unable to scale. This inability to scale is the same problem we see with quantum computers.

I wonder if EMP resistance was also considered, and if analogue computing could have offered better resistance compared to the digital devices of the time.

Impossible to know, though the use of nuclear weapons by an enemy was probably on everyone's mind, and diversity of redundant systems may have been applied in case some hypothetical enemy air defense came about during the lifespan of the aircraft.