J.E. Lighter, The Random House Dictionary of American Slang (1994) reports that the origin of bitching in a positive sense was student use:
bitching adj., ... 2. Stu. excellent, wonderful, exceptionally attractive. Also, bitchen.
[First two cited occurrences:] 1957 Kohner Gidget 10: It was a bitchen day too. The sun was out...in Southern California. 1962 English Jrnl. (May) 323: Bitchin' equivalent to neat or swell.
The instance in Frederick Kohner, Gidget (1957) reads in context this way:
I tried it. I was sort of desperate to write this story so I drove out to the main drag (I got my junior license only last week) all by myself, and I took that pencil and notebook along and was all set to begin at the beginning. I mean with the description of the place. It was a bitchen day, too. The sun was out and all that, even though it was near the end of November. But then, we are living in Southern California and if you wouldn't look at the calendar you'd hardly know the difference—honest!
Gidget is a surfer-girl novel, written by the real-life father of the original gidget (gidget, we learn, is a surfer palindrome for "girl midget"). A discussion of the book and of the California surfer subculture of 1957 in "Gidget Makes the Grade," in Life magazine (October 28, 1957) reveals another instance of bitchen in that subculture:
The book tells how Gidget learned the difficult art of surfboarding—catching the "bitchen wetbacks" (big waves) and "shooting the curls" (riding the surf) without "getting the ax" (falling under a breaker). An indomitable girl, Gidget finally masters the board.
I don't recall ever having encountered the term wetbacks except as an derisive (and offensive) name for braceros—unlicensed Mexican nationals who cross over the U.S.-Mexican border to pick crops and perform other hard labor in the United States. (The term wetback refers to their having supposedly crossed the border (illegally) by swimming across the Rio Grande, which forms the entire border between Texas and Mexico from Brownsville/Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso/Ciudad Juarez in far west Texas.
In any event, the positive sense of bitching can apply to bitch as well, as this glossary entry in "The Parlance of Hip," in Esquire, volume 52 (1959) indicates:
BITCH: something very good. Example: That song is beautiful. That musician has a bitchin' ear. Bitch also means girl or woman, but not in a derogatory sense. Example: I've got me a fine bitch.
The "not in a derogatory sense" language here may be intended to indicate that a a person using the term may not mean to convey the idea that the girl or woman so designated is unpleasant or unattractive in any way, but the notion that "bitch" is therefore not derogatory appears to be a relic of a particular (and peculiar) male view of the subject at the height of the Mad Men era.
And a glossary in the Saturday Evening Post, volume 234 (1961) has this entry for bitching, along with entries such as "like wow," "like cool, man," and "swinging":
bitching — joyous term, as in: "I had a bitching (or joyous) time."
Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960) find an even earlier antecedent for bitching in a positive sense in bitchey:
bitchy, bitchey adj. 1 Having the attributes of a bitch. 2 Striking in appearance; classy. 1930: "A pearl-gray Stutz, a bitchey roadster, all right." J[ames] T. Farrell, 137. Some c1930 use.
The Farrell citation comes from a short story called "Looking 'Em Over" (1930).
It's not impossible that the use of bitchin' in 1950s surfer lingo directly recalls the early 1930s usage of bitchey in a similarly upbeat sense. But it may be even more likely that the adjective bitching (or its more elaborate sibling son-of-a-bitching), popularized by soldiers during World War II and the Korean War, provided the inspiration for the newly positive bitchin'. In any event, it seems truer to attribute its origin to the surf lingo of Southern California in the late 1950s than to student use, as Lighter unaccountably does after noting its early occurrence in Gidget.
Analogue comes from computing.
"A Chronology of Analogue Computing" article in The Rutherford Journal
The word ‘analogue’ was first used as a technical term during the
1940s, and referred specifically to a class of computing technology.
Today, the word enjoys much wider usage, typically conveying
continuity. For example, engineers will discuss analogue and digital
signals, and musicians decide whether to record their work on analogue
(continuous) or digital (discrete) media.
Analogue computing emerged during the nineteenth century and became a
mainstream computing technology during the early twentieth.
The word analogue has been used because the electric signal, for example, in analogue telephone line, is transmitted in a way that the voice vibrations correspond to electric signal fluctuation. In other word, the electric signal 'imitates' the voice.
In digital transmission, voice is coded into bytes, then is decoded with special protocol.
Another example is radio vs Morse code. Radio directly (by analogy) transmits the voice with electric signal variation. Morse code transmits only combinations of dots and dashes that are decoded by a trained person. So we can call Morse message digital because the concept is the same coding and decoding rather than an electric analogy of physical phenomena.
So the word analogue is used to reflect the concept when some physical phenomenon is converted into its electric signal analogue.
The word digital is used when a phenomenon properties are coded, then decoded.
Here are a few examples and articles to explain the difference between analogue and digital concept:
The basic difference between analog and digital technology on howstuffworks.com
Analog vs. Digital with explanation and comparison chart on diffen.com
Best Answer
It seems you're quite right about the translation origin, from Russian. It's a rare term, but which get regularly used by people familiar with Chinese or Russian Military History.
The earliest use in this sense that could be found so far is from
-1862-
Dickens, Charles. All the Year Round. London: Chapman & Hall, 1862, volume 8.
This is a journal partially authored and fully edited by the famous victorian writer.
In a section called "How to make soldiers"
First use I found which also explain the origin of the term in pseudo phonetic transposition:
-1876-
The Russian CampaignAgainst Khiva in 1873, Part 1 by Hugo Stumm, Foreign Department Press
It seems to be the earliest reference in English. Anything before that relates to the actual coldness of steel.
Some other references of usage of the term across the last 150 years, still influenced by the Russian origin though.
-1890-
Gustavus Adolphus: A History of the Art of War from Its Revival ..., Volume 2 Par Theodore Ayrault Dodge, page 571
-1914 -
Infantry Journal - Volume 10 - Page 298
-1982-
Daily Report: People's Republic of China, Numéros 148 à 155 Couverture United States. Foreign Broadcast Information Service National Technical Information Service,
-2016-
Krav Maga Professional Tactics: The Contact Combat System of the Israeli Martial Arts, David Kahn, YMAA Publication Center, Inc
As a bonus if you want to try searching it in cyrilic it seems to be "холодное орудие" (I don't speak Russian)