Possibly an urban legend but there's a story about a company in India that ordered a Soviet made computer system that has an sloppy spool of wire attached to the main board. They contacted the Soviet institute that built the computer system and it was explained that the computer needed a timing delay between two components but didn't have the proper ICs on hand so they used a precise length of wire to introduce the needed delay to make the timing correct.
As a stone cold fact physical mediums with known delay timings were once used as memory storage for computers and as "echo removal" filters in radar installations.
Although a mathematician, Turing took quite an interest in the engineering side of computer design.
There was some discussion in 1947 as to whether a cheaper substance than mercury could not be found for use as an ultrasonic delay medium.
Turing's contribution to this discussion was to advocate the use of gin, which he said contained alcohol and water in just the right proportions to give a zero temperature coefficient of propagation velocity at room temperature.
Back in the old days of analog video, component video was three separate cables. When we made custom cables, we had to ensure the cables were the same length to ensure the timing was within tolerance. The day we got to switch to digital SDI which also included audio as like a gift from the gods
This was probably also due to impedance matching between all the lines involved.
Digital signals (when using N/P balanced lines) also have this problem, to a lesser extent. Some CAD EE design software have ways to design squiggly traces to balanced impedances in traces that have to go around corners on the PCB and end up with different lengths.
This is still a problem for modern multi-lane digital connections, like PCI Express. The solution? Make each individual lane self-timing, and compensate for it digitally in the receiver buffer.
