Do you know how to use one??

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

My daughter came into my office and asked to use a ruler. Sure top drawer of the Credenza. She opens it and picks up a slide rule, looks at it briefly and says what does this measure. Well it doesn't measure anything, it is a calculator. No really what does it do? It is a calculator. I answer. So she says: Here show me how to do 22 x 9. So I show her. Then come all the questions about how it works, and what else it can do. And of course it has been forever since I really used one. She lost interest, or so I thought, and then a couple hours later, I over hear her on the phone, telling a friend about the slide ruler and it multiplies and divides without batteries. .......

[Bill Orbine]

To be honest, I have a couple slide rulers and I never learned to use them. The cheap calculators came out just in time!

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I was using slide rules until the first HP scientific calculators that used reverse polar notation came out. Due to an advertising mistake I got one for really reduced price.

[lowell holmes]

I have both, but I don't know where the slide rule is.

[Alan Rutherford]

I know how to use one.

Several years ago I was visiting a local private school with my son and his mother to see if we wanted him to go there, probably around 7th grade. The Math teacher had a slide rule on his desk for some reason. I showed him how to use it. Son went elsewhere.

[Jason Roehl]

I was using slide rules until the first HP scientific calculators that used reverse polar notation came out. Due to an advertising mistake I got one for really reduced price.

I have an HP 42S in the desk drawer (RPN) that I've had for about 28 years, and an HP 42S simulator app on my smartphone. RPN lives!

[roger wiegand]

I had the great good fortune of an uncle who was a physicist who believed that kids should be taught mathematics before the school system convinced them it was difficult. One afternoon when I was in the 4th grade he told me all about logarithms and how you could multiply and divide by adding and subtracting them. The notion has been intuitive ever since and I used a slide rule from that day until the point in grad school when we could afford an electronic calculator-- a plug-in-the-wall device the size of a shoebox that would only add subtract, multiply, and divide, and cost about $600. A year later the first HP calculators appeared and it was history.

Another vote for RPN-- I've never figured out how to use the other kind, the order of entry is just wrong. Who thinks "48, now what operation do I want do do, OK, divide, now by what, OK 12 then think again to actually do the operation by pushing equals?" (if all the rest of you think that way, break it to me gently!) For the record, my thought process is "48, 12, divide".

[John K Jordan]

Yes, I have several and still use one on occasion. There was a thread recently about slide rules.

[Lee DeRaud]

Slide rule...isn't that the one where the runner isn't allowed to do a rolling block into second base to break up a double play?

(I'm old enough to remember when most math classrooms had a huge Pickett slide rule mounted on the wall behind the teacher's desk. Apparently they gave them out free to schools that bought large quantities of the normal-sized ones.)

[Stan Calow]

I've been picking up nice ones at estate sales. I only remember how to multiply and divide. Yeah we had one of those giant ones in the chemistry lab in high school.

[lowell holmes]

If I were still working, I would have one. I had a 10" and a 6".
I would go inside refineries and chemical companies to do field work.
Maybe I will buy another one just because . . . . .....

[Marty Gulseth]

I bumbled through all four years of engineering school using a slide rule. Yep, I’m THAT old! I sincerely believe that, had I had a “modern” scientific calculator, my GPA would have been a full point higher...

[Ron Citerone]

In my Junior Year in High School I used one for Chemistry, in my Senior year Physics we had calculators and never picked up a slide rule again.......1975, 1976

[Lee Schierer]

I still have my slide rule. We were issued one at the naval Academy and I used it all 4 years. I switched to a calculator in 1972 but still did sines and cosine, etc on the slide rule it was more convenient than a book of tables. My grandkids didn't believe me when I said you could multiply and divide with it. I used to have a circular one but I don't know what happened to it.

[Paul F Franklin]

The HP scientific calculator came out while I was a JR or SR in high school, but no way I could afford one. I made it through a year or two of engineering school using my dad's slide rule. Then TI introduced a more reasonably priced scientific calculator (SR50?) and I made the leap. As I recall, there was quite a bit of controversy at the time about allowing students to use calculators on exams and such. It was seen as a fairness issue because of the cost. But once the TI model came out the concern pretty much evaporated.