Page 4 of 4 FirstFirst 1234
Results 46 to 47 of 47

Thread: Do you know how to use one??

  1. #46
    Join Date
    Feb 2016
    Location
    NE Iowa
    Posts
    1,217
    I saved all summer in 1973 to raise $395 for an HP35 to replace my slide rule at the beginning of the 1973 school year, but by the time I had the money to order it (from an ad on, I think, the last page of August 1973 Scientific American), HP had introduced the HP45, and so that ended up being my first electronic slide rule. I still have two of them, both work, but one has several missing LED segments, so isn't terribly useful. I use an HP45 simulator on my cell phone when I need a calculator for the occasional shop calculation (typically simple trigonometry).

    I also have the slide rule that the HP45 replaced.

    As long as we're reminiscing about HP - in 1976 we took delivery of HP 2640A ASCII CRT terminals. HP built a character mode terminal with a backplane that took add-in cards for storage and other purposes. They came with a program you could run an an HP 3000 minicomputer (for which the 2640 was designed) to download diagnostics to the 2640. We hacked the download, and figured out how to program the 2640 - basically turned them into an early personal computer, 5 years before the IBM PC, 2 before the Apple II, and contemporary with the early backplane personal computers like the IMSAI.

    Fast forward to today, when there are entire computers, complete with batteries and Bluetooth Low Energy communications that fit in the margin of a contact lens and can be used to monitor glucose levels in tears, or focus the lens with piezoelectric components.

  2. #47
    Join Date
    Nov 2016
    Location
    Itapevi, SP - Brazil
    Posts
    672

    Thumbs up Oh, yes!

    Quote Originally Posted by Perry Hilbert Jr View Post
    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. .......
    Oh yes - once a time I was very good to use these slide rules, actually the two I had is over my table now, my regular size Faber Castel 2/83 and my pocket sized Aristo 868, both made in Germany. I remind my richer colleagues used Japanese ones. I got the transition between slide rules and scientific calculator and probably I was the last one to use one at the Engineering graduation! They were fully replaced only on 1981 by my HP 15C, also in one of my desk drawers but unfortunately had its battery pins felt out when I tried to change its batteries a couple of months ago... but the slide rules are working great!

    Another thing I learned how to create and I used a few times were alignment charts... I think nobody use them since 1960s...
    All the best.

    Osvaldo.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •