Have you ever used one of these? Tools from the past.
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- čas přidán 3. 07. 2024
- Back before electronic calculators were invented, slide rules were the main tool for making scientific and engineering calculations. While you could make calculations manually with paper and pencil, it was slow process. Mainframe computers were available after about the 1940s or '50s, but these aren't easy to use for simple calculations. Using a slide rule could really speed up the work. I chose to use this in my channel avatar because I was the last graduating class in my high school in the mid-1970s to learn and be required to use this tool in my classes. The following year, scientific calculators were required. As I went to engineering classes in college, they were required for certain classes, depending on the professor. So, I came of age with a foot in both camps--the old way and the start of the new technology. It seemed fitting to recognize where I began my technical journey.
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I finished high school in Australia in 1970.
We were not allowed to use calculators, but in the engineering type classes we were taught to use slide rules and were expected to use them in exams.
By the way many pilots still use the E6b or cr 6 flight computers, the "whiz wheel".
These are actually circular slide rules with special reference points marked on them as an aid to use.
They are used to calculate time and distance, fuel required as well as conversions like weight of fuel or oil, miles to nautical miles or kilometers, ect.
They are very fast to use, require no power and can be used with one hand.
So the slide rule still lives on in the modern world!
I still have my E6B and am proud of it, from 1965. Paid $2 for my first "used" slide rule in 1961. Bought it from an old country boy that didn't know what it was. I got a real bamboo slide rule in 1963 for $40 - which was a Lot of money. Still have it!
Do folks here remember the giant slide rules hanging in classrooms? They were used for teaching and often found in math and science classrooms. I think it would be cool having one of those hanging in my den.
Some people easily discard this object as "obsolete" but they should remember that it are exactly these "calculators" that made space traveling possible, as well as sending probes into deep space and keeping the International Space Station in orbit. And then there are the thousands of ways in which they have contributed to the modern ages. No, not obsolete but indeed important, extremely important.
Well said, thank you.
No BATTERIES or electricity required!
Well stated.
Old joke. Ask an engineer what's 2x2, he whips out his slide rule and says 3.9
Then rechecks and says 4.1, so takes an average of both results and says 4.
Yes. I bought mine during a trip to Germany back in 1962, when I was 17 going on 18 (sorry, but I've just been to the Austrian Tyrol), knowing that I would be going to university to study mechanical engineering. When I got back home, I bought an instruction book, which recommended practising for 10 minutes a day.
That would be pretty sloppy. Tried this on my old K&E. I get 4.00, even 3.99 would be sloppy.
I understand it is an old joke, but I agree it would be very sloppy work. I just tried it on my 1970 vintage Jason bamboo slide rule, would be off by about an 1/8 of an inch to get 3.9! or even 4.1!
2+2 =4
2 *2 = 4
2 ^ 2 = 4
Anything else?
I started college fall term of 1972. One of my first classes was slide rule use. I had a Post Versalog II which I had bought at my HS store. My professor checked our work with a four-function calculator he built from a kit advertised in the back of Popular Electronics magazine. My first slide rule was 6" Sterling 587 just like yours. I bought it in the fifth grade and learned how to use it on my own, with only the supplied instruction sheet. I still have that slide rule.
I took the same class in 1970.
I remember the 4 function kits in that time frame. They were interesting, and I was interested in building one, but the price was still rather high for a high school student.
Anyone else remember the 5’ or 6’ long slide rules that the teachers would use? They’d hang from hooks over the chalkboard…
I worked in IT until I was 68. Almost all of the other 18 or so members of the staff were half my age or less. Once I mentioned a slide rule in a meeting. No one knew what it was. They called me grandpa and would often ask for advice, but I often had trouble translating what I was telling them to their experience. Time moves on to new roads and the old ones fall to dust.
I graduated High School in 79. In the Navy in electronics school, we used scientific calculators. Which I had never seen before. But all our electronic calculations were done on these. Later, when I entered the Army (89), I was branched into Field Artillery. In Artillery school, we used slide rules for everything when computing data for the guns/howitzers. It was months of training in what was then called "manual gunnery" I am glad we did, in the last 4 weeks of Artillery school we learned computers for gunfire control. But the slide rules gave us a firm foundation in the basics of controlling the fire of large guns before we went on to computers.
I was an instructor at Ft Sill for a while before going on to Nam. In VietNam, I think we were just as effective when we just worked with chart boards and slide rules as when our FADAC computer was working. Before going into the army I had my BS in engineering so I was very familiar with slide rules. In VietNam, I was the E5 over the FDC so when we got a fire mission I let the guys start working the manual solution while I went out and started the generator for the computer. Of course that involved winding a rope around the flywheel and hand starting it. Hence, the computer required much more manual work than the slide rule.
When I was in school math was not the strongest subject. T may teacher wanted the answer out to four decimal places. He said if you use a slide rule you only need three places. I learned that slide rule fast. It helped me later when I had to use an E6B slide calculator.
I had a slide rule way back when I first started university. I couldn't do much with it, and for me showing it simply meant I was smart. Looking back at that time and reflecting on the beginning of my teaching career in the late 70s to mid 80s, the Rubic's cube amongst students took on the same feel: to be seen as smart everyone had to have one dangling from their clothing showing it had been solved. A student of mine that occasionally caused me problems had one that was always in the solved position. On one such problematic time I asked to see it and proceeded to scramble it. The look of panic on that student's face was amazing. Later in the day I noticed the cube was back in the solved position, and I learned that most students were just pulling off the little cubes and sticking them back in the solved position.
That's called "Thinking outside of the cube."
Dad was an engineer and bought me my first slide rule when I was 13 in 1961. I bought a new one in 1965 when I started training as an electronics tech. I still have Dad’s Hemmi bamboo slide rule, in its leather case.
Me too. Dad's is pre-war.
I'm 71 and still have 2 slide rules somewhere. My kids will think they're mysterious when I pass and they have to clear out my stuff. My first calculator was a Rockwell LED display and it was fantastic.
Ohh, I only have one left. My youngest brother broke the other one at high school.
Yes, I liked my Rockwell. I think I still have it tucked away somewhere.
Thanks for the nostalgia! Thru HS (1965 grad), slide was virtually grafted to my hands. Plastic. Now lemmee throw a curveball--- if you wanted to be a *real* geek, you got yourself a *CIRCULAR* badboy. So you were able to extract more accuracy because it was 3.14 times as long as a straight one having a length equal to the circle's diameter. My first experience with electronic calculator was late 60s when I was on a job and they gave me a Friden 8-cell (?) desktop model.
You're welcome! I never tried the circular ones, because I was at that transition point where calculators were coming in quickly, and that began to replace my slide rule.
No batteries required. I was taught how to use a slip stick in college. I still have it...somewhere. After graduating I put the slip stick away and never looked back. Great video thumbs up.
Nah not "slip stick" - guessing stick.
@@phillargus2757 hahahahaha dip stick! ...just kidding :-)
Haven't heard slip stick in years.
Thank you. I don't find much use for the slide rule these days either, yet I don't like to forget the lessons of the past.
@@bitsofwisdom460 Taking statistics courses right now to polish my quantitative skills and I have noticed that making the calculations with a slide rule - where reasonably possible - helps me to better understand what I am actually calculating and to remember the method. Using the slide rule forces me to think more about what I am actually doing, while I tend to mindless button pushing when using the calculator.
So, bottom line: I feel they might still be a valuable didactic tool in schools.
What I like about the Slide rule is that one needs to mentally keep track of the decimal place unlike the calculator. This helps one to concentrate and sharpen one's mind.
Thanks for refreshing memories of my days in technical college mid 60’s working metric and imperial calculations in slide
In high school (1972-1973) I had a Pickett aluminum slide rule. When I started college in 1974 my parents bought me the Texas Instrument SR-11 electronic slide rule. It had the square root function key, which was a big deal at the time. The calculator cost my parents $168 which was very expensive 50 years ago. I still have the slide rule and calculator.
but can you still find battery for it?
I started college in 1965. There were no hand held calculators for any price then. I paid $36 for a 12" slide rule from the college book store. I remember that amount because it was a lot of money for me back then. By 1970 when I was in the army we had a Friden calculator that had a 4 " video screen and it had a 4 line memory and I think it was accurate to about 10 digits. It cost several thousand dollars. 5 years later I bought a digital watch with led read-out for $10 bucks. A good TI calculator was $20 bucks, they still are. God bless calculators. They are now $1 buck at the dollar store.
In 1963-67 I used a Keuffel & Esser in HS and U of Houston in the Engineering College. Most satisfactory! 🤠
The K&E was what we all aspired to! Pickett was what most of us actually had. I liked the yellow version!
I still own one I used in the 1970's. It still works 100%.
And the battery hasn’t gone flat! 😊
Nice, reminds me of the E6B for aviation calculations that I learned with when getting my pilot license. Things have certainly changed....
Still got my slide rule from 1960s School Days. Also have a Circular Slide Rule I recieved on my first Day at work. 🇦🇺
Brings back memories. For my first two years in college I used a Pickett slide rule. My first scientific calculator was a HP 65. Still have both.
At yard sales and thrift stores once very expensive Eugene Dietzgen Co. slide rules can be had for a couple of dollars. Like a Dietzgen Maniphase Multiplex Vector Type Log Log Rule - Cat. No. N1725. Some of its scales are so small (on the LL3 & LL03) a magnifying glass would be needed to see it well enough to use accurately. I can only use it to multiply and divide. I still have my 6" aluminum Pickett slide rule my mother bought me in High School.
Ditto drafting machines and scales for drafting machines.
Wonderful - takes me back to the the early years when I used a slide rule to do all my computational work. My father bought me an Arisro Hyperbolog slide rule when I started college in 1957 and I still have it today. He taught me all the short cuts and how to get the decimal point in the right place. When I show it to young engineers, they are completely baffled. Most of them had forgotten what they learned about logarithms in high school. My father who was a teacher in a technical college in the UK, even showe his students how to make a paper slide rule. My dad made a 6 foot long slide rules to demonstrate its use in class. Long gone are the days when very accurate work was done with 7 figure log tables.
My first calculator was the HP 65. My current calculator is the HP 50G, probably the finest calculator in the world (in my opinion). RPN logic works in exactly the same way as the brain works and is very fast and at the same time very flexible.
The nice advantage of slide rules is that they don´t need batteries.
Apart from several long ones shown here, I got a nice pocket size one, in the shape of a disk.
My 1973 high school physics teacher told us slide rules were better than pocket calculators. No batteries needed and they could do more functions.
After high school, in the mid 80s and early 90s, I worked at my Grandfather’s machine shop during the summers. Calculators were available and affordable but my Grandfather insisted that his machines knew how to use a slide rule. He taught me and I still remember how to use it. The slide rule that he gave me is proudly displayed in a shadow box and hanging on my wall. I used a slide rule, in the early 2000s, to take my ham radio test using a slide rule instead of a calculator.
My dad gave me his Post Versalog when I was in high school. I had to teach myself to use it, no instruction for that given in either high school or college. Our high school math area had a lone HP-35 calculator on a cable lock for students to use.
First year in college (1975) was no calculators allowed in exams, but the second year, they were allowed. However, exams were still set up for slide rules, in that you could simplify equations on paper then just do the final calculation on the slide rule. A friend of mine had a calculator that second year. I recall one of the first exams you could hear all the clickety-clacks of the buttons on his calculator. In the meantime, I set up the calculation on a piece of paper and then a few flicks of the slide rule and I had the answer.
By the third year, all the exams were tailored for calculators. I ended up buying a TI SR-52 programmable calculator and that was awesome. For each class, I made a custom program card with all the common formulas needed, adding to that card as the semester progressed.
I learned first from a book at the library, unimaginatively but very descriptively titled, "How to Use a Slide Rule." We also had a brief course in the first week of Chemistry class.
By the time I got to high school, slide rules were gone but we still used a variation of them in aviation called the E6B. But by the time the middle 80's came even the venerable E6B was being replaced by specialized electronic flight calculators. I don't know that I could use either a slide rule or an E6B anymore without struggling.
Since I am 73 years old I do remember slide rules and used slide rules in my young days. I likely still have an old slide rule stored in my home.
When using a slide rule change all numbers to powers of ten. Then will have no problem keeping track of decimals.
I was in high school in the late 70's-early 80s. At the beginning, I remember we could NOT use calculators on exams, but we could use slide rules. By graduation, almost every one had and were allowed to use the standard TI-30.
My father taught me some basics when I was a kid over 50 years ago. Still have that slip-stick.
I attainedy engineering degree in 1965. Slide rules, log/trig tables and basic arithmetic were my only tools until calculators became commonly used.
I still own three silde rules.
I started university in the fall of 1964, so of course I used a slide rule. When the HP-35 came out in 1972 I immediately bought one. There was a waiting list, but only for a few months. And it cost $395.00 plus tax, $2,948 in 2024 dollars. EVERYONE wanted to play with it as the university hadn't received one yet. By the time they went through their internal paperwork they had a six month wait. I was an adjunct lecturer (spare tire) in the evening school at the time so I interacted with lots of students learning electronic design, a course for scientists, not engineers. I remember one student was so excited he dropped the calculator and then reflexively punted it down the corridor... the look on his face. :) And remember, it could do arithmetic, three trig functions in both directions and various log functions only, no programming. It used an LED display, so its run time was in singe digit hours, but was rechargeable.
In 1968, I threw away my Slide Rule and did all my Engineering problems usings Napier Four Figure Log Tables. Good thing about that was my opposite page on the exam question had all my log and antilog data so that the examiner could follow everything I did. That year, I got a perfect paper! Master was very impressed, first time he had a student get everything right. I couldn't multiply now on a slide rule and would probably take awhile to sort out my logs. !
I still have the two slide rules I bought about 1970, when I was working as an Engineering Estimator. One is a circular slide rule and the other is a tube. The scales on these rules were longer than the usual stick rules and so gave more precise answers. There were also tricks you could do with a slide rule that you could not do with a normal electronic calculator, e.g. get the weight of round steel bar by just putting the "1.0" on a constant (2.12).
I went through school just after the introduction of calculators into the classroom. I remember the big slide ruler above the chalkboard. Never was taught how to use it but always carious about it. I have pick up couple of the slide rulers from estate sales. I wasn't able to figure out how it is used. Thank you!
ONE student in my final year of tech college in 1976 for electronics had an early HP35 full scientific. And a few had the early TI calculator that did square and square root along with the basic four functions. The rest of us plugged through with our trustly slide rules. I still have my fancy 18 scales two sided plastic wonder toy I used to get through high school and Tech College on display. 71 years old. Thanks for bringing it all back with your video.
I still have my first slide rule too. I got it in 1964. I think it still works, but I haven’t used it in a while. I suppose the battery would need a recharge to get it (or me) going.
I knew what a slide rule was, but never learned to use one. Thank you for posting this video.
The hand held computer before calculators ... love them.
We still used slide rule in high school back in the seventies and there was a book of tables as well.
It's a fantastic tool an analogue device and I think it's a great invention. ❤
I graduated high school in '63. I had a Pickett Trig rule in HS. In the Navy I got a Pickett electronics 'rule and bought a Sun-Hemi 'rule when I got to Japan. I have about 8 or 9 'rules now, 2 of them circular, 1 a binary rule. The nice thing about 'rules is they don't require batteries and you can take the slide out and use it to make a logarithmic graph. They have also outlasted a lot of calculators. The Oughtred Society is THE goto place for Slide Rule info.
You can buy many different kinds, even make your own, from Sphere Research in Canada.
Taught myself how to use my brother's "slide rule" at the age of 14. What magic! A stick that could do the math for me. I even showed my junior high math teacher how to use it. I sold my university stick just recently for $90.
I graduated HS in '63. My engineering education at a Big 10 school and my first several working years were entirely with a Post Versalog slide rule. I saw my first electronic calculator around '65. It was massive and had 5 or 6 Nixie tubes for display. I think it did add, sub, mult, divide, nothing else.
This brings back memories of my father when I was a little kid watching him using his slid rule and he also had and adding machine on his desk that he used as well he was and accountant,,, he would have been 85 ,
I was invited to my old alma mater to give a guest lecture. On my way to the room where I was to speak, I passed a display case containing various "antique" items relevant to the department's activities and there was a slide rule very similar to the one I had used so long ago. Time flies.
I had a similar experience, I visited the National Science Museum in Tokyo on a business trip many years ago. I walked by a display case and noticed the same exact model Jason bamboo slide rule I used in high school and college. I still have it and showed it to my grand daughter who is in high school. She was fascinated especially after explaining it was based on log scales. Thanks
@@richbreton5105 Where did all those years go?
Really nice video that brought back many memories to this 77 year old retired engineer.
I bought my Dietzgen slide rule when I started engineering college in 1965 and used it until graduation in 1970. Entered active duty in the USAF in 1971 and after basic training my first assignment was for a Vietnam Tour but based in Thailand. Didn't need it much there. My second assignment was at Wright Patterson Ohio starting in October 1972 and I did take it with for that assignment with the Foreign Technology Division. At that time the Air Force had a program where you could get 75% of the cost of "Job Related" college courses reimbursed. It was probably 1973 or 1974 at the latest that I wanted to take a course in transistor amplifier circuit design that was being offered as a graduate course, but I could audit the course without enrolling in a graduate degree program and get the course approved by the Air Force. This was especially true since the course met in the evening after my duty hours so I enrolled.
For the first meeting of the class at the nearby University I took my trusty Dietzgen with me. In the class room there was the instructor and perhaps twenty or twenty five students in the class and only TWO people had slide rules. The rest had some form of scientific calculator. The only two with slide rules were myself and the instructor!
My Lab Partner had a Texas Instrument scientific calculator and we met at my off base apartment to prepare our lab reports, and I got to see how useful it could be. When the price dropped below $100 at the base exchange store I bought a TI-35 and used it for years. The amazing thing was, that from my graduation in late 1970 the slide rule in engineering classes in college had almost completely disappeared just three or four years latter.
Used this to figure wave propagation for designing Antenna in the 60’s. So simple, easy and no batteries!!
When I started high school, there were no electronic pocket calculators yet. As a birthday present, my parents bought me a top-of-the-line Pickett N4-ES metal slide rule with *34* different scales. We students didn't get our first electronic calculators--four-function Casios that could just do arithmetic--for another year or two.
I still use one in financial work! The slide rule is great for continuous-time calculation. If a number is changing a lot, I could type it into my calculator over and over again every time something changes, but it’s easier to have a slide rule there and just bump it one way or another to track results from small price movements.
As of 1981 we were still taught how to use slide rules in The Netherlands at our secondary school. Not used it significantly as scientific calculators had already overtaken them.
In the Kennedy Space center i was in a group of people listening to the story about the first space flig 9:26 hts. When we were told that in these old days all calculations were made by slide rulers, the person next to me said that he still did his calculations with a slide ruler, i looked at him and asked if it was the circular specially made for calculations of the values of electronic components, he said yes. I do the same and we could agree that it is actually faster than a calculator and the results are as accurate as they need to be when you are going to use the nearest standard value of the component anyway.
In 1977 I started an education to become a communication engineer. we had to get a slide rule and learned to use them. at this time the first electronic calculators were affordable. I remember the devices from Texas Instruments. In fact I did not get much experience with slide rules and after some 47 years I am not able to use them.
I still have my father's 20-inch slide rule, which he used in college in the mid-1930s and I used in college during the late-1960s. It is capable of 4-digit accuracy in the low numbers and can do trig functions as well as multiplication and division..
I obtained my engineering qualifications between 1975 and 1981. I still have my two slide rules and my first TI-59 programmable calculator with a magnetic card reader.
I learned it in grade school. Slide rule got me thru college 1973. Calculators available later. Slide rule was a huge advantage for me. A plastic Pickett slide rule was $2.
Ah, the venerable slide rule, or "slip stick". First a K+E (Keufel and Esser) bamboo model; later, one of the broad, yellow, aluminum log-log-duplex things. Carried it in a leather holster hanging from my belt. We were SO cool. (Started college in fall '65.)
Probably a Pickett. That is what I had. Some favored aluminum, others wood or bamboo. At least with the Pickett you could always use it to change a tire, they said.
@@stihl0256 Yup, a Pickett, that's it. Thanks, stihl0256! Good times!
I still have one! Used it starting high school in the mid 70s.
In 5th and 6th grade math classes I was taught the very basics of using a slide rule. By the time I got to high school they were obsolete and everyone had a calculator.
My dad, a mechanical engineer, used to own a slide rule. He tought me how to use it in the early eighties. Impressed a few highschool teachers with that knowledge.
Wouldn't know one end from the other nowaday, though.
My father, a chemist, gave me a slide rule when I started high school in 1963. But it was circular! It could fit in a shirt pocket.
He also gave me a book of trig tables, log tables, etc. Also very useful.
As a college student, I had an engineering job in automotive. We had calculators, but my manager showed me the corporate book of trig and log tables. He said that when the company bought their first mainframe (1950s?), they used it to create their own book to test out the new computer by running all the calculations.
I competed in slide rule events across Texas while in high school. I was the last person to use this tool in chemistry classes at my college. I currently have over 200 rules in my collection....
Still have mine also . I get it out every now and then just to refresh my brain bucket . I believe that we should practice some of the “ old ways”, just incase they may be needed.
I still have a slide rule and my draftsman's tee-square and boxed compass set from when I was taking technical drawing in high school in the early 70's.
I still have one, I took it to work recently to show it to an engineering student, he didn't have a clue what it was. Near the end of high school programable calculators were being introduced, we weren't permitted to use them on exams because we could preload them with formulas.
I love my hand-me-down K&E log log duplex decitrig. I was a poli sci major and later law school, but I loved carrying my sliderule to class.
My college days were all slide rule, saw my first four function calculator on my first job in 1973 or so. It was $400. By 1980 or so we were getting them in our laundry detergent boxes as bonus gifts.
When I was in electronics school in the Navy, we used slide rules for our calculations. I had a Pickett Electrolog . I still have it, and the three booklets that came with it explaining how to use all the different scales.
I had to use a slide rule throughout my engineering course at college, although we did use hand-cranked mechanical adding machines for one of the exams. Like you, I also had a 6 inch pocket slide rule. It was remarkable how much could be done on these simple devices.
I bought my first electronic calculator (a 4 function Casio) in Japan for Y20,000 in 1973, but I still kept my slide rules for a few more years.
I started Physics at McMaster U in Hamilton, ON in 1964. My slide rule was an essential tool throughout undergard amd Msc years. I still have a 20-inch slide rule-amazing accuracy. I switched to an HP-65 for the PhD.)
Yes - used one at school in the 1960's - still have it.
I took a slide rule to school in 1966 and got in trouble from my maths teacher for using too high tech. I was told to use log tables. Used one all through university. From Brisbane Australia.
Although my first calculator was a HP-25 that I purchased in 1975, the latest being a HP Prime Graphing Calculator, I have since amassed a collection of slide rules and I am a member of the Oughtred Society. Yes, these days, slide rules are collector's items, some being quite expensive, especially the circular ones.
When I went to tech school in the late 70's, they made us use a slide rule even though calculators were available. It wasn't until later in the course I finally got to buy an hp.
I still have mine - the big desk one and the six-inch pocket sized one - and the batteries never run down!
Yes. I have used these. Still have 2 of them.
They work well.
I graduated high school in 1976. The last day of math class the teacher collected the slide rules and said, "These are getting put away, next year we are switching to calculators".
this brought back memories for me too as i was doing Industrial arts subjects in high school and all we got was slide rules to do all the calculations. I still have mine in great condition. Its a Kent 309 Student and still works fine. As you mentioned when calculators first came out in the early 70s I wanted one because i was racing pigeons at the time and needed to calculate accurate velocities. I got a remington Casio for christmas . Cost a huge $52 australian back then was very expensive, and it only did the 4 basic calcs. When i went to Uni i got a Texas Instruments Programmable Calculator and that was great. Still have that too and it works but the mag strips (where you saved the programs) don't read to well now.
Great points. I learned to use a good slide rule long before I bought my HP-41CX. Like you said, they required some mental math, especially to keep track of the decimal point and the number of zeros. Retaining that skill still prevents getting garbage answers with a calculator. To this day, still use the slide rule on my Breitling watches.
I had one that I used in school in the UK in the late 60 /70's. Mine was a 12" British Thornton. I also had a book of logs and trig tables. Still have both of them. My life course didn't include maths, so they went away and rarely see the light of day.
It is an old-school calculator, aka Slide Rule. I taught myself how to multiply and divide with it as nobody I knew could teach me how.
I had several slide rules back in the day. They were quite accurate before calculators came to be. The SR-71 was designed with them in the late 50s. Pretty amazing tools actually. Wish I still had them now just to have them.
My Dad was a contractor and spent his evenings figuring bids. He had a large electro mechanical adding machine and sometime in the late 60's had an electric mechanical calculator that was noisy as heck when doing division. It might work for 15 seconds as I remember to do division. The mechanical digits would roll like a slot machine and under the plastic lens the face over the number discs or drums would osculate back and forth. Then he bought an electronic calculator sometime in the early 70's that used 8 digit vacuum tubes with with 10 digits inside each tube that lit up an orange glow when excited. It was quiet and fast. I would sneak to the basement when he wasn't around to do my math homework. He also used a slide rule before the calculators.
You could do a whole series on the old style calculators. I remember the engineering students walking around with the leather slide rule scabbards hanging from their belts.
I got a bamboo slide rule with a plastic covering. It was a log, log, deci, trig unit. The bamboo was supposed to be more accurate than the plastic ones. There were books out on how to calculate how good or badly inaccurate your slide rule happened to be. Problem with the plastic ones was the slide tended to get crooked after a while and your accuracy would be off.
Prior to the hand held calculators were the desk calculators running on 110 volts. After you punched in the numbers and hit the calculate key the Frieden units would start to whirr, then go ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk unit they finally finished the calculation.
Because of the lack of calculators my statistics class had a whole chapter on how to manually sort data. We'd spend hours doing data sorting. Now, you just put the data in an Excel spread sheet, press the enter key and the data is sorted. And, of course, Excel does a lot of statistics work as a matter of course. We'd spend hours looking through a data list to find highest/lowest numbers. Spend a lot of time calculating average. Now, all done in less than a second by the Excel sheet.
Ah, the good old days! ... Not!
Slide Rule! 1960's 70's Purdue - I graduated high school 1983 - first year for computer at my high
Yes, the slide rule was an essential tool up until calculators. Purdue Engineering had mainframes with Fortran during my time in the late '70s. I still used punched cards.
We had the first IBM desktops at my GM division in 82 / 83. Double floppy disk. Little did I know that during my time in the Purdue EE school (before I switched to ME), they were trying to teach the design principles leading to the IBM PC.
Still haven't mastered a VOM, but a slide rule was part of my first real job, in my late-teens calculating weights, polar moments and the like in the aircraft industry... long ago...
Still have mine in my desk and it’s still available for use. I have an abacus somewhere as well.
when i went to Johnson College in 1973 we used the slide rule everyday , I still have mine!!!!
I've got two slide rules from my earlier engineering days. I'm now retired, so I only ever use them for working out the cost of the shopping.
I still have mine from helping get the Saturn V off the pad, Great calculator and it never needs batteries!
My favorite slide rule, was a “Concise Brand, circular slide rule with reference table.” It was seven dollars at my highschool student store, and
I got my BS mechanical in '73, and my Meng Mechanical in '74, both from Cornell.
I heard about amazing scientific calculators in 1970, but they were like $1500. I first touched and used a HP-35 as a Junior. People would 5:59 "rent" a HP-35 for an exam, where the calculator could save time in combining addition and subtraction with multiplication and division (and trig and exponenents and Square roots. "Rental" was typically $50-75.
I continued to use the slide rule integrated in the E-6B in aviation.
Truth is there are damn few variables in engineering that are known or accurate to 3 significant figures, much less more.
For chain calculations or Mult/Div by a constant the slide rule is faster. And the batteries don't crap out when you least expect it.
To me, the slide rule is an incredibly clever effective tool.
BTW, the HP calculators were incredibly tough, and would work no matter what you did with them. A HP salesman visited Engineering, and opened his pitch by throwing a HP-35 into the corner as hard as he could. Then he asked if anybody had a Texas Instruments calculator that he could throw.....no takers! The HP he did that with was scratched and nicked, but it worked every time.
All these first gen calculators had short battery life because the LED displays used a lot of power.
The next generation used LCD displays and ran forever on 3 1.5V button cells. I still have a HP-10C that I have been using since the early 1980s.
I've got about a dozen of them. Learned to use the basics in my freshman math class in high school in the early 1970s, figured out more as I went along through school, and used it throughout college in the late 1970s-early 1980s as a chemistry major (scientific calculators were too expensive back then).
I also used a slide rule in high school. My sophomore year in college, I bought a TI SR-10 calculator- it did addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reciprocals, squares and square roots. No trig or logarithm functions. I photocopied log and trig tables from the CRC Handbook (reduced of course) and taped them to the back of the SR-10.
My dad taught me to use one when I was about 10; he gave me one of his and a thin green book about how to use it. When I got my first calculator it did multiplication and division so I no longer used the C and D scales; but still use it for square roots and logarithms. Finally I got a TI SR-71 scientific and put down my trusty slide rule.
In 1971, I got through all of Naval Nuclear Power School using the slide rule. In 1973, I saw the first Texas Instruments calculator being used. That was on board USS George Bancroft, SSBN 643.
During my first (1973-1974) job making pizza I 11:52 saved as much money as I could for college tuition and books but I bought a ‘running’ 1967 GTO for $275 dollars and a Texas Instrument SR-50 scientific calculator for $157 dollars.
Engineering in the '60s used Post Versalog slide rule, return to college in the '70s use a TI SR50 calculator, return to college in the '80s used an IBM PC. During that time span used IBM360, DEC PDP11, then IBM 390 (?) for some serious number crunching. One thing very handy about slide rule was you could pull out the slide and in your lab notes use the scale to make your own log, or log-log graphs by using the L slide scale as a ruler. The sig-fig problem remains a problem, not so much for engineers and scientists but for ALL the other keyboard jockeys.