Thread: Slide Rule

Still have mine from school somewhere, didn't have portable calculators back then.

I worked with one of these for quite a few years.

Also had one of these on my desk.

Then in the mid 70s I got my first handheld electronic calculator, an Adler similar to this one. Cost an arm and a leg, $80-90 as I seem to remember and had fewer functions than the $2 shop variety today.

Still have a couple of mine from school and uni. Too well made to throw away even though they're completely superseded.

I did my undergrad degree with a slide rule. Got my first calc to take my educational statistics exam. Damn thing used to chew through batteries and they went flat mid exam luckily I had brought along my slide rule!

Originally Posted by Big Shed

Then in the mid 70s I got my first handheld electronic calculator, and Adler similar to this one. Cost an arm and a leg, $80-90 as I seem to remember and had fewer functions than the $2 shop variety today.

you got off lightly

my first calculator cost something like $240 (in 1974 $) --equivalent to about $1900 in today's dollars, but not only could it add, subtract, multiply and divide, it could do trigonometry functions.

Originally Posted by ian

not only could it add, subtract, multiply and divide, it could do trigonometry functions.

I think they were, and still are, referred to as the "scientific" versions. I still have and use my scientific calculator, but it was from a slightly later era.

Regards
Paul

I still occasionally amuse the students by doing calculations as quickly on my circular slide rule as they can on their calculators. Also used to use the Facit at work, and in quiet times, we youngsters used to have Facit races, to see who could crank them the fastest. We also had a Marchant, which was sort of like an electrical Facit. Every so often it would seize up, so a squirt of WD40 int the innards would clear it.....or perhaps it was the explosion when the motor sparked.

Funny I was just talking about this with some one the other day. When I was in engineering school, also early 70's there were a few calculators around, I think my father had an HP-55. I think the thing cost about US $400 at the time. Wow. At Purdue, at the time they would not allow any calculators to be used in the classroom, or with exams. Slide rules only. Freshman engineering students actually had a full semester of classes on slide rules.

I had a beautiful slide rule that I used that was my fathers when he was in engineering school. Alas somewhere along the way I lost it.

Neil

My favorite mobile phone app is the HP41CV emulator with RPN data entry and that is my standard go-to calculator as I know how to drive these pretty fast. I still have my original HP41CV with the little magnetic card reader - at one stage I had a nuclear reactor model running on it that would take around 16 hours to run - about half of this was because the model itself could not be all held in memory and stuff had to be written temporarily off to magnetic cards. When the first 8088 PCs came out the nuclear model interim data could be stored on the HUGE 20 Mb HD so it ran in less than 10 minutes so I expanded the model (more variables and wider parameter space) and it then took over an hour to run. When the 386 PCs came out with bigger memories the whole model matrix could be held and worked on in memory so comp time came down down to under 3 minutes. I stopped pursuing the model at that point but I assume it would be down to seconds by now.

Originally Posted by ian

my first calculator cost something like $240 (in 1974 $) --equivalent to about $1900 in today's dollars, but not only could it add, subtract, multiply and divide, it could do trigonometry functions.

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

I think they were, and still are, referred to as the "scientific" versions. I still have and use my scientific calculator, but it was from a slightly later era.

When I said add, subtract, multiply and divide I was thinking of one of these




Mine was one of these and it could handle polar notation and (once you knew how) working with i {= Square root(-1)} was a breeze



and for all the youngsters, the early to mid 70s HP calculators didn't use brackets for nested formulas

Never learned to use a sly drool or scientific calculator.

What couldn't be reasonably done in my head or longhand
was done with log and trig tables.

I guess I was lucky to go through school (in the UK) just as everything was changing, so got to try both sides of things....

Started maths with a sliderule, then basic 4 function calculators came in about midway through my education. Anyone remember those Sinclair Scientific build it yourself calculator kits?

I also started school using imperial measurements, and changed to metric halfway through. This means that I now freely switch between systems depending on which is easiest to visualise, e.g. 3mm, 1/4", 1cm, 1/2", etc.

Still use the Hewlett Packard 32S Scientific Calculator that saw me though Uni. Once you get used to their weird RPN number entry system, its hard to go back to a regular calculator !

Ahhh polar notation , no wonder the yanks like the tv show jeopardy

BobL - ahhh, the HP-41C calculator !!! I used to lust after one of those, but the budget would only run to a 32S.....