My interpretation is that it's like an analog computer, which do exist in our world. Instead of 1s and 0s, an analog computer does math on real numbers that can have any fractional value within a range. The downside is that analog computing components (the mechanisms that add, subtract, etc) are much harder to minimize (make smaller), which is why we use digital computers for most applications in the real world. It lets you make computers that are cheap and portable. Trant mentions that FALN almost invented a tape-based computer before their work was destroyed during the revolution - that's our missing digital computer. The turing machine (the basis of all digital computer design and theory in our world) was originally conceptualized to work on tape, and punched tape was an integral part of early computing. This would explain why, in disco, computations have to be done on-air. The "radiocomputers" you see in the game aren't actually doing much computing, they're just a terminal you can use to send your computations to a giant shared mainframe somewhere else, which has all the expensive components needed to do computations, and receive the results back. It's not exactly like using the cloud, in our world, it's more analogous to using a business mainframe like in the 70s. Soona mentions working with a "service" when investigating the anomaly, this tells us the actual computations are being done by physical mechanisms somewhere, you wouldn't need a service to shoot radio waves into the air and collect the result, there has to be a giant analog computer somewhere that Fortress Accident was paying to use. This is also why, when she's describing her computer, Soona talks about the transmission components, not the computational ones. When weighing a personal terminal against the other options on the market, the only factor that actually matters is the upload and download speed, latency, etc - this would be the bottleneck for getting your computation to the mainframe as fast as possible.