Slashdot Mirror
When Slide Rules Were Like Cellphones (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Slide Rules and Pocket Protectors are the go-to items when making fun of old-time geeks. Forget the pocket protectors. Slide Rules were the first personal computers and a status symbol akin to what cellphones are today. Of course the general public wasn't attached to them, but engineers were. Before electronic calculators came around, everyone who needed to do some serious math owned Slide Rules. Stunningly easy to use and extremely effective, they have tick-marks placed on a logarithmic scale which makes complex multiplication, division, powers, etc. into visual calculations instead of mental ones.
Didn't have calculators when I was finished high school (year 12).
Still in it's plastic cover with the manual.
Drag it out now and again just for a laugh.
"...but destined to take the place of the mud shark in your mythology..." - FZ
(Disclaimer: I used a slide rule in high school in the 1970's, and we actually had a section of a class in how to do so)
Person A: "What's 2 times 2?"
Person B: "Let me check my slide rule, one sec... OK, looks like around 3.96."
But how can we use slide rules to encourage women and minorities to join STEM fields?
I was in high school in the early 70's
We spent way more time using 4 digit log (and trig) tables than slide rules
Of what? Seriously... As ubiquitous as they are, they are about as much of a status symbol as shoes.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Use it as a paddle?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
An uncle was an honest-to-god rocket scientist. Things he built are sitting on the moon right now. When I was in elementary school he gave me a slide rule and told me I needed to learn how to use it. Pretty bad advice. :-) Within a couple of years, and before math classes could have used a slide rule, inexpensive 4 function electronic calculators arrived at the local department store. And each year's new offerings were much more capable.
Decades later while cleaning up I found it and brought it to work to show my fellow geeks, software developers. The CEO was passing by my office and noticed the crowd, poked his head in to see what was going on. He ended up staying about 15 minutes alternating between the manual and slide rule to figure out how to do different calculations.
Everyone was just so impressed with what a few sticks with tick marks painted on them could do. Hell, its how we built the machines that got us to the moon.
First some backgroung: Slide rules only give the characteristic of the answer not the mantissa. It is a fancy way of saying, it does not tell you where to place the decimal point. Thus often people fly through the slide rule all the way, without doing the decimal points for intermediate answers. Once you have the final answer, you eyeball the number, see which decimal point would be reasonable and jot it down. Saving valuable time not doing decimal work, during examn time.
This was the point that prof made: He would set up the problems in such way the answer would be off by a factor of 10 on purpose. A 230 volt, 10 cm dia motor would come in at 75 watts. But people who don't do decimals would write down 750 watts because, that is the reasonable answer for such a machine. Thus he would know which students have a feel for the numbers and answers and who blindly follow the procedures and write down whatever answer comes out of the formula. His complaint was that he lost a valuable filtering tool to judge which students are worthy of being considered for RAships.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Jeppesen CR-3 Flight Computer is a circular slide rule that is still in use today. The circular slide rule has long been a tool of pilots, air traffic controllers and even bookmakers! It's not just science types that use slide rules.
slashdot has become completely irrelevant
I stole a copy of "Why a Slide Rule Works" from the high school library and was way ahead of my math class the following year on logarithms & exponents. Asimov was a pretty good teacher.
I still have a Post VersaTrig around here somewhere...
There are many examples of fine old technology that can be admired for the ingenuity that went into devising non-digital solutions, and that depended on being precisely made.
Slide rules were nice. They were a working tool for just about a century, very roughly 1870 to 1970. There are always some virtues to old technology that are lost when it's supplanted by new--the discipline of keeping the characteristic in your head and never losing track of the order of magnitude, the freedom from the illusion of precision.
They were only mildly status symbols, at least at MIT during the 1960s. There was a certain amount of discussion of the comparative merits of Keuffel & Esser (wood) versus Pickett & Eckel (aluminum), whether it was better to fold the scales at pi or at the square root of ten, and so forth. Plenty of people got by with cheap slide rules. I never heard of any cases of slide rules being stolen.
Keeping them properly lubricated, keeping the scales aligned, keep everything tensioned just right so that the slide and the cursor would move easily when you slide them and then stay put when you stopped pushing was a bear. More than once, people were embarrassed when the slide would actually slip out of the slide rule and clatter on the floor.
When I saw my first HP-35 pocket calculator, $295 IIRC, I said "There, at least, is something that I'd accept in place of a slide rule--if you promised me it would last for decades and never break.
Yes, I feel some nostalgia for slide rules--but let's not exaggerate.
Oh, by the way--that "2 x 2 is 3.96" joke above is wrong. On an exact answer like that, on a well-made slide rule if you put the index of the C scale over 2 on the D scale--and you can get it so that it looks perfect, and the eye has darn good vernier acuity--the 2 on the C scale will be perfectly aligned with the 4 on the D scale. You would read it as "4." You couldn't possibly read it as 3.96, 3.96 is two full scale divisions away from 4.
The problem comes when the answer lies between two scale divisions. For example, 3.98 and 4.00 are two adjacent marks. You would be hard-pressed to tell whether an answer were, say, 3.99 or 3.993.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
.... Werner von Braun's slide ruler in a display case. It was exactly the same one that my grandfather used to own, and that I got to play with when I was a little boy.
The use of calculators were strictly forbidden in my physics courses during the late 1990's, so I asked my instructors if I could use a slide rule during exams. They said yes, so I did. It was a lot of fun to whip out that slide rule on an otherwise stressful day.
The cheapo models were made of plastic, but the debate at the time was whether the best models were of bamboo or magnesium construction. Mine is made of bamboo. There was also an elitism factor - how many scales does your slide rule have? Whether you used them or not was irrelevant.
The one thing slide rules do not do naturally is plain old addition and subtraction. There are multiple hacks (e.g., antilogs) and it was a competitive challenge to find the "best" way. Seem to recall that my method used the S and T scales.
One thing a slide rule tells you that a calculator doesn't, is that those last few digits in a real-life calculation are not important.
I need to steer clear.
Yeah, slide rules are a complete anachronism, but not without worth. I still have one in the garage. The batteries in them seem to last forever as well!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
My father, Jack Harker, was a very senior manager at IBM. He was Director of the San Jose [IBM] Labs in the 70's and 80's. He was also one of the quiet giants of the disk drive industry convincing IBM upper management to develop thin film disk heads and the original Winchester technology.
Jack loved to tell how in high level presentations when lots of figures and projections were being put up on the screen and the numbers didn't seem right, he would reach over and pull out his old 16" ivory K&E slide rule from his college days. The younger managers and engineers who had not seen him do this before would be flabbergasted, quite often offering to get him a calculator. He did this for two reasons. The first was to flummox the presenters and push them out of their comfort zone. The second was that he found a slide rule with its logarithmic scales was very useful for visually looking at growth projections. A quick look to see if the numbers actually made sense. Knowing my dad, I think the first reason was why he kept doing it. He enjoyed the looks of disbelief he got. Even more so after he quickly verified the numbers.
I sure do miss him.
It's on my Citizen Skyhawk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Never had to use it but I can.
Do you have ESP?
as we found out when I was at school in the 1960s, is that for things like chemistry and physics experiments where you knew what the answer should be, you could set the slide rule to the answer and read of pairs of values that would give that answer.
Try that with a calculator.
I agree with most of that, but I never had much problem keeping my slide rules lubricated, aligned, and tensioned. Slide rule maintenance was a lot less hassle than keeping a cell phone charged and the software updated. I used a slide rule through college and into my first job, but jumped at buying a TI SR-50 scientific calculator when they first came out in 1973, also paying about $300. But the tactile feel for calculations that the slide rule provided has never left me. I still own mine and have a slide rule app on my iPhone, just for fun. If you've never used one, get one on eBay and give it a try.
What I find interesting is that it took a tremendously more advanced technology to render slide rules obsolete.
To make a slide rule, you need to figure out logarithms, then make exact marks on wood or something.
To make a modern calculator, you need to invent the microchip! You also need to invent a suitable display technology: light-emitting diodes or liquid crystal displays. We literally put a man on the moon before anyone was able to make a pocket calculator.
I love reading old science fiction stories set in the far future, where in the year 3423 or whatever people are still using slide rules. I imagine in the year 3423 people will still be using chairs, and probably spoons won't be too different... and back when those old stories were being written, slide rules seemed like that kind of basic item that wouldn't be going away.
P.S. Before the "pocket" calculator was invented, there were electronic desk calculators using Nixie tubes! Watch this video and think of how much labor it would be to assemble one of these. The soldering work alone guarantees that a typical college student could never afford one of these, but I'm sure NASA had calculators like this for engineers to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mig3TeKh0aU
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yep, you knew it had to be true: iPhone and Android.
We will never be the change to the weather and the sea
In addition to one I carry (Pickett Model N 3-T) I have a decent collection, including some special purpose 'slide rules' or circular calculators. Like an Air Force MB-2A. And a couple of (now declassified) missile and nuclear weapons effects calculators.
Have gnu, will travel.
there were lots of possible slide bars. Ones for trigonometry, etc.. Most of the boeing planes up to the 747 were made by engineers who still used slide rules. Sure there were calculators and computing machines too, but slide rules were still in use by old timers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I still have an old supermarket-purchased slide rule from my days at school (I was schooled at the juncture between slide rules/log tables and pocket calculators). After reading Cliff Stoll's article (http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2006/stoll2006a.pdf) I treated myself to a Faber-Castell 2/83N and I have to agree that it is *beautiful*. On my desk at work I keep its miniature cousin, a 62/83N prominently displayed.
The digital caliper replaced the analog caliper. I miss the vernier scale, a really clever invention to squeeze out one more digit of precision than one would think possible. I doubt most kids today have any idea what a vernier scale is. The differential micrometer is another very clever device which works like a mechanical version of the vernier. My guess someone thought of it after seeing a vernier scale.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Indeed, small difference of large numbers is only a problem for computers who brute force things. Quad precision is for wimps. Engineers had lots of tricks for re-writing equations so that the terms would naturally sum to a small number without large intermediates. I recall learning 4 different ways to write the quadratic formula that would avoid cases where b^2-4ac was the difference of large numbers or -b + sqrt(b^2-4ac) was the difference of large numbers. Since comuters I don't think I've ever seen that used. it's always coded with the textbook -b + sqrt(b^2-4ac). This is also why many eignenvalue algorithms give signular results in modern compuations. People don't spend the time to figure out how to avoid those precision level differences.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Slide rules are indeed a very old technology. In fact, the underlying principle goes all the way back to Noah.
After Noah got off the Ark, he sent the animals to go forth and multiply. And each month he went out to see how they were doing. As you might guess, after the first month or so there were baby rabbits, then baby cats and dogs soon after, and even a baby elephant after the first year. But month after month, Noah could find no baby snakes.
Finally it dawned on him that the snakes were cold blooded, and needed to sun themselves in order to get active. But the wet ground, and the lack of trees, had been perfect for bushes, weeds, and all kinds of plants, and the snakes were getting shaded out as it were. So Noah went back to the Ark, collected some timbers he'd used to strengthen the decks, and used them to build a table. And sure enough, the next month there were baby snakes! (scroll down...)
Which just shows to go, even an adder can multiply if you give him a log table.
In this recent animated film from Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the hero is an aeronautical engineer, and there is a scene which includes a loving closeup of a log-log-decilog slide rule. It establishes beyond doubt that engineering is heroic, just like a Final Fantasy sword-as-long-as-wielder-is-tall. (I went to engineering school when a 4-function calculator cost $200 and still required a wall plug; by the time I graduated, you could get one with four functions plus square root that worked on batteries.)
Holy crap, I'm old and even I never used a slide rule. Calculators were just coming out when I was in 8th or 9th grade and by the time I had graduated High School they were everywhere. $40 or $50 would get you a pretty damn good calculator.
If not for my $15 Texas Instruments calculator (a mandatory purchase for tech school) I never would have made it through and neither would anyone else in my classes. Calculating Thevenin circuit values would have taken all day on a slide rule. We'd have spent most of our class time fiddle-fucking with slide rules instead of actually learning electrical theory.
Yeah, they're cool and all that but so were buggy whips, and I had no desire to use one of those either.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Then you have never been around manufacturing. You are at least 30 years off the mark if there is one. We were building turbochargers and superchargers POST 9/11 using high school slide rules. I collect slide rules. They are great if your smart enough to run one.
As has already been mentioned, when I took my Pilot's License the Cessena Student Kit included a Circular Rule, and was the standard tool used everywhere in Aviation. If you boarded an aircraft during the 1980's, you were depending on a type of Slide Rule to get wherever you were going safely; if you were flying a light aircraft you probably used one up until sometime in the last decade.
When I owned a retail store in an industry where discounts from MSRP were Standard Operating Procedure, we kept our Wholesale Price Lists at the front counter and staff made quotes and/or sales based on Cost Plus [our required margin]. The margin was based on paying all the bills and taxes and leaving between 5 and 10% as Net Profit for the year.
We used a Circular Slide Rule for that and other calculations, such as "We Pay The Tax" calculations to find the required retail price, the required Sales Tax amount, to, say, sell an item for $120 all in. And so on.
Our Retail stores used them up until the late 80's. With a manual entry sales invoice, a Cardboard Box for record storage (File Storage Boxes) and a Cash Box, we sold $Millions annually and had records of sales (e.g. for warranty work) for a decade that would fit in a closet.
We used Pocket Calculators to do addition/subtraction math, such as adding up the quote or writing the Sales Invoice. The "lack of precision" of the Rule made quotes much easier since you would get a visual representation of your cost plus margin, which made rounding to two or fewer decimal precision very easy.
One notable feature of the system was speed ... it was WAY faster to create a quote, give "ballpark" figures for transactions during the Sales or Demo phase (over the phone, like 5 seconds) or do a complete transaction of, say, 10 items with brief descriptions and Serial Numbers in less than a minute. It still drives me a bit crazy in retail as a customer today when it comes to how long it takes for simple transactions.
In 1971 I took the required freshman Engineering slide rule class. Not too difficult as I had been using my father's K+E Log-log Duplex Decatrig for many years and my father had taught me many tricks to squeeze out one more significant digit. (I still have it.) Not only was it dropped from requirements, but it was not even taught the next year. I still think it was a bad idea.
I also took tube design (valve to you Brits) and I still think that what I learned there was invaluable even though I never worked on any tube circuit other than CRTs and Thyratrons.
Slide rules still catch errors that a calculator won't.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
I had both the school issued smallish slide rule and one I had inherited from my father which was much nicer.
However, I used log tables when I wanted even more accurate answers: One year my main wish on my Christmas list was a book that provided full 5-digit log tables. :-)
After I read about Taylor series I realized that I could calculate anything to any accuracy I wanted, but it still took a couple of hours (high school physics class) to calculate pi by hand with 20+ digits using the arctan formula.
(At this point in time, ~1975, I had just bought my first calculator, a TI SR50A which still works when I connect it to a couple of AA batteries instead of the original NiCd rechargable.)
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
For several years in the late 1990s and early 2000's I had an office in the former Pickett slide-rule factory building in Santa Barbara California, on Gutirrez Street. The building was originally a giant aircraft Quonset hut made out of sheet metal, and was located on the site of the former Santa Barbara airport before the airport moved north of town. While rummaging through some old materials in the attic area, we came across a giant 10 foot long slide rule, apparently used by Pickett for marketing or training purposes. In the 1960s and 70s,
Santa Barbara was a hotbed for DARPA projects, and sliderules were an important everyday engineering tool.
Ironically, another tenant of the building while I was there was Larry Green, who helped build the first node on the original ARPAnet, which ultimately became the Internet. Larry had an actual Internet message processor (IMP) front panel in his office, and all the associated documentation. It was fascinating listening to him tell about the early development of Internet communications technologies.
I just came across a blog entry of Larry Green's IMP work in Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/200...
Two revolutionary cusp technologies in the same obscure, non-description building. A fascinating coincidence.
Three puns in one punchline - nicely done!
As someone too young to have seen slide rules, I nonetheless loved this quote when I read it in Asimov's "I, Robot":
So they waited and relaxed until the drawing-board men and the slide-rule boys had said âoeOK!â
Despite the references to the nerd technology of the time, the intent of the sentence is so clear that it brought a smile to my face, thinking of the nerds that would have read that back when it was written and instantly feeling a sense of recognition.
had a slide rule which he probably acquired while at cornell university studying engineering physics. he then used it at the saturn missile project site in huntsville, and at the berkeley Rad Lab. he didnt use it much after that, but i loved playing with it. he taught me to use it at least twice, and i promptly forgot, as i had no bug for engineering. i got a TI calc for ap chem in 78, loved that too, wish i still had it. i still have my dads slide rule, which brings back memories for me. he worked on the Harvard Project Physics text, and we had advance copies of the modules lying around in 1965-66, and as result the images and text of physics are emotional triggers for me. I even thought i was a test subject in one image from my science books, so my personal reality melded with the larger world of physics. I would keep my dads "lectures on physics" by you know who (if you dont know who, then you MUST leave slashdot immediately) on my kiddie bookshelf. he ended up working as a lab supervisor in le conte hall, again, if you dont know why thats an important building, you must leave immediately. god i love physics. I mean im crying
Sure we had slide rules, I've still got three, but Us Real Geeks had an IBM 360 reference (green) card tucked behind our pocket protectors along with the assembly ref. Just for the cool factor you understand because we had them committed to our magical meat memories and analysed our core dumps easier than mortals could read a bus schedule.
Let me guess, you're working at the local Pizza Hut now?
Playing Angry Birds on a slide rule was so tedious!
Log Log for $1.50 with a pigskin cover. We suspected the pigs used werent that fresh.
Didnt see a calculator until I was a senior in college and their library got some desktop LED models.
No, but nice try. You see, nerds have this fantasies about making it big after high school and one day take their revenge on those who put them in their place when they became too bothersome. Guess what, it never happens. Nerds cannot focus their attention nor do they possess the discipline to make it through college. It's them ending up doing menial jobs and escaping into fantasy because they can't face real life. Meanwhile we better-adjusted people enjoy our lives.
I never used my slide rules in the fashion of a cell phone. However, my cell phone does have a calculator.
Also, I never wore mine off of my belt. The good ones were too long and too expensive to dangle and flail about. Most people I knew had a pocket one for convenience and a better, longer one for the real work.
Slide Rules were the first personal computers and a status symbol akin to what cellphones are today.
"Status symbol"? Maybe if you were in physics class with the other geeks. More of a scarlet letter to the rest of the population.
Don't get me wrong, I've used a slide rule (dad lent me his) and rocked it proudly but let's not pretend it was a status symbol outside of a very narrow group of people.
While the "slip stick" is no longer used pretty much anywhere, any amateur pilot will be able to quickly demonstrate his E6-B Flight Computer. The proper use of this device is mandatory to obtain a pilot's license, and it's actually a pretty decent way to perform a lot of quick, yet otherwise-complex calculations for fuel burn, wind drift, en-route time, etc.
In commercial aviation, they've been replaced by flight-planning software and more sophisticated avionics and navigation systems, but they are still in wide use for people flying "personal" aircraft.
During an language course I proudly showed my teacher that I'd programmed my new Psion Organiser to display conjugations of all the verbs and adjectives we'd covered. His reply was swift: "Very Interesting" - "It's obviously cleverer that you are"/
A bit like languages, then?
I graduated with a BS in engineering in 1970. In 1973, while stationed at Wright Patterson in the Air Force, I was able to take an "after hours" graduate level electrical engineering course at Wright State University in Dayton. When I went to the first class there were exactly two people (that's 10 people for those who think in binary) who had slide rules. ME and the PROFESSOR. Everyone else had a calculator by then.
Shortly after taking that class the first Texas Instrument scientific calculator became available in the Base Exchange for just under $100. I bought one immediately.
Another example of the very fast change from Analog to Digital happened where I worked. We had a problem that required an APPROXIMATE solution to a number of partial differential equations and the estimates for running it on the large mainframes available to us at that time were way out of our budget. However, we had access to a very nice and large analog computer that was just gathering dust and a few of us were able to set up the problem on it and run a solutions that were fine for our needs in just a few hours.
Finally, engineers who learned the trade on slip sticks had to have a pretty good idea if the answers even made sense or were way out of the ball park. As digital calculations, either on calculators or computers, replaced the three or four significant figures available from a slide rule the wrong solutions were often calculated with great precision.
"they have tick-marks placed on a logarithmic scale which makes complex multiplication, division, powers, etc. into visual calculations instead of mental ones."
Americans...
"they have tick-marks placed on a logarithmic scale which TURN complex multiplication, division, powers, etc. into visual calculations instead of mental ones."
Not "makes", not "make". You don't "make complex multiplication INTO visual calculations"...
We were required to use slide rules in a college level chemistry course. For complex calculations involving very large numbers and step by step solutions covering multiple pages of formal proofs the slide rule was sort of hell on Earth. It was as if you were trying to drill down through a very skilled use of the slide rule all the while trying to keep your mind on the chemical equations you were dealing with. It could be done but one solid hour of that could drain your mind in such a way that it left you stupid for several hours.
I still have my K&E log-log made of mahogany with a plastic vernier scale.
I have Starett analog caliper and micrometer, and another Starett analog caliper in metric. I HATE digital calipers.
Other than the battery issue I don't really understand why you would dislike digital calipers. Our shop uses both analog and digital. The ONLY real advantage to analog is that you don't have to change batteries ever, which for some situations is nice. Otherwise the calibration procedures are the same and they work similarly effectively. Digital ones in my experience tend to be modestly easier to use but the difference is very minor outside of some specialty applications.
If you get drawings in both metric and US customary like us, carrying two measuring devices quickly becomes tiresome. Digital can switch between with a press of a button which is nice. Digital calipers can also output readings to a computer directly which can be really handy if you do a lot of it for stuff like PPAPs. There's nothing wrong with a good analog measuring device but there's nothing wrong with a good digital one either.
I was the first student on Carnegie-Mellon's campus with a calculator. People ask me how I knew. The answer is, they were generally unaffordable at $250 ($1,500 current dollars).That said, I had straight (a few), and both types of circular slide rules. The first type had two indicators (this was a Gilson slide rule, the same kind held by Peter Sellers in 'Dr. Strangelove'.) The second type had a rotating disk and one indicator (made by Concise). I found and bought another one with a bunch of conversion tables in Paris in 1974.
The thing about a slide rule is that it can tell you what the mantissa of the result is - but not the exponent. You have to figure that out yourself. Is 3x3 = 0.9, 9, 90 or 900? The slide rule doesn't really tell you that - so you're forced to do an estimate of the result in order to get a fast answer. This process of estimating was a useful double-check on the sanity of the result that is not present with things like calculators. So while the precision of a sliderule couldn't come close to a calculator, the discipline of using one did reduce the error rate for gross errors.
When I got my first calculator, I gleefully ditched my slide rule - but I did come to mourn it's passing. Of course you *can* use the same estimation techniques to use as a backup check on a calculator too - but because you don't absolutely need to - you don't.
www.sjbaker.org
Of course the general public wasn't attached to them, but engineers were.
But the general public *are* attached to cell phones. So, while clever, the comparison fails.
Not to mention the iTunes store (and I'm sure Google as well) offers several different slide rule apps.
I had (still have) a circular slide rule that gave me 5-6 digit accuracy. But for most engineering work 3-digit accuracy may be enough. (Do you really want to trust your life to something that doesn't have more than 1% design margin?)
I learned to use one in high school and bought my own as a freshman in engineering. Used it full time till I bought my first calculator in 1975 (HP RPN-style, of course).
I still pull it out to show students when they are learning about logarithms in school. I was doing just that earlier this week in fact. And my younger colleagues at work are always interested.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Concise/Sama&Etani ST600 was my go-to in high school. A circular slide rule, it had a little insert with an incredibly detailed, dense plastic cheat sheet (the sheets varied, math-oriented, chem oriented, etc.) and a periodic table on the back. Shirt-pocket sized, if you wore the right pocket protector ;-)
Pics at the link just fill me with nostalgia (for my visual acuity at the time; sucker's hard to read now ... sigh).
I designed computer chips, then later on controllers for spacecraft and don't own a cellphone. I'm fairly normal (I think, but don't we all). I had one, but never used it and it got lost.
You might be quite normal in many ways but not having a cell phone is decidedly not normal these days. I barely know anyone who doesn't have a cell phone. Some admittedly use them more than others and not everyone has a smart phone but it's actually kind of hard to find anyone who isn't a child who doesn't have one.
Damn, I regret not being able to upvote this.
I had a crusty old proff who said it was perfectly fine to use a slide rule but calculators were forbidden. We clashed over it to the point I walked/was thrown out.
I've seen it happen many times. Your really really just wrong (and stupid, obviously).
The post starts out "When Slide Rules Were Like Cellphones", and Cellphones, as we ALL KNOW are ubiquitous consumer items. while sliderules were NEVER ANYTHING LIKE THAT.
Then the post says
"...Slide Rules were the first personal computers and a status symbol akin to what cellphones are today."
Not really because as the post says right after,
"Of course the general public wasn't attached to them..."
So, not at all like cell phones, except that you put them in your pocket and ....
Wow.
No. Just... no.
I'm sure small abacus are a wee bit older than any slide rule, and they can add, subtract, multiply, divide and take roots
The digital give me too much information,
Only if you purchase a measuring device with greater precision than you need. For example we have a set of micrometers at my shop that measure to three decimal places. We could have purchased ones that do more but since our presses that make the parts they measure cannot do better than +/-0.001" there is no point in having a measuring device more precise. That isn't an analog vs digital thing. These ones happen to be analog but we would have done the same thing if they were digital.
Also when comparing parts it's easier to just look at the approximate difference in dial movement than remember the two numbers and subtract them in my head.
Depends on what you are comparing I suppose. For what we do approximations are of no value at all. Either the part is in spec or it isn't. Perhaps what you are doing is different but that would be an unusual case.
... low-digit IDs posting on this topic. Yep, that's the demographic.
(disclaimer: I too have an old plastic K&E tucked away in a box somewhere downstairs)
licet differant, aequabitur
Or nostalgia?
There was a fellow in my high school back in the 60s that went around with a slide rule in a leather holster hanging from his belt. He apparently wanted to look like the engineering type. We used to call him "the fastest slide rule in the west".
Check out www.oughtred.org
The HP-35 :-)
Cost me a whole month of work in college, was the first one on campus to have it. Finally Retired my circular slide rule.
I still have both and they still both work!
About 30 years ago, we already had pocket calculators in school. My elder sister, though, still had a book about calculating with a slide rule. I managed to get the book from her and a slide rule from someone else, and started exploring. Being the math geek in class, I could afford a bit of risk, so I brought the slide rule to a test where all my classmates used calculators (I still had mine in the bag in case the teacher would forbid using the slide rule). You should have seen the faces when I used that "plastic thingie" - and still was the first to finish, and later got the top score in class (again). Some even accused me of cheating, but the teacher was quite amused about it.
It was a fun experience, and I could even teach other people about it in university - we had a giant, working slide rule (a few meters long, probably an old demonstration device from a lecture room once) as a decoration on a wall.
My HS science teacher would race people with calculators and always win with his slide rule. When he was at his desk he'd move the thing back and forth really fast but when he was racing someone he always slid it along all even and slow and eyeballed them like they were trying to get him to believe a lie or something. It was really funny to watch.
Every rule has more than one consequence.