Originally Posted by
Bill Howatt
I used one in the 60s and later primarily for electrical/electronics work. It wasn't a specific EE model but had all the exponent scales etc. Found it in the back of a cupboard a few years ago and I could do the basic multiply and divide but the fancier scales were certainly not obvious anymore.
My boss had a much longer one so he could get at least one more digit in the calculation. The PITA with a slide rule is determining where the decimal point goes in the answer.
I had a physics prof who despised calculators, and insisted we do all calculations to, as he put it, "slide-rule accuracy". Of course, he had a monster that would barely fit in his briefcase and cost more than the car I was driving at the time. The engineering majors in that class were miffed, as HP had shown up on campus giving out free HP35s to the engineering students as a largish-scale beta test. (Thankfully, I was a math major: I absolutely hated RPN.)
Fast-forward four years, and I was at Rockwell on a project proposal that required a ton of manual spreadsheet work. This was awhile before VisiCalc was invented or had anything to run on, so the company brought in cases of their as-yet-unreleased "cheap" calculators. And cheap they were: the over/under for keyboard failure was measured in days...I'm not sure I ever saw one of them for retail sale anywhere. The older engineers grumbled about them, but hey, slide-rules can't add.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.