Remember the slide rule?

by JH 29 Replies latest jw friends

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  JH

  Did you ever work with this contraption? When I was young, I used it in school. Did you ever use this, and do you still remember how it works?

  I could just imagine a kid going to school with this today...
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  LittleToe

  I still have two. One is a highly accurate plastic one, like you pictured above, and the other is an antiquated wodden one.

  I never did work out half of the things you could do with one.
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  maxwell

  My dad gave me a plastic one similar to the one in the picture although I broke the part with the vertical red line. Shame on me. (I had it in my backpack one day with some heavy books and laid it down the wrong way.) My dad showed me how to add and multiply on it once but I'm not sure if I remember how to do that anymore. I just keep it as a sort of antique collectable. A cool item from the past. When I was in college, I remember seeing a gigantic wooden slide rule (~5 feet) sitting in one of the engineering classrooms. I love that scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers pull out their slide rules and start calculating frantically.
• 

  Amazing

  We used them in school ... then I remember the first electronic calculator our chemistry professor bought for the class ... it was the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter ... but with a 25 digit green display. It performed quite a few functions and cost $2,500. I was awe-struck ... it felt like we were really getting into the Star Trek era ... and now that old things seems like someting from planet of the apes.

  I have several slide rules ... my favorite is a circular rule with two slide arms ... it is like fiddling with a clock ... but I could do lots of stuff on it ... now all my old rules just sit in a box in storage ... while I liked the slide rule, engineering became much better with the evolution of the computer ... and I would never want to go back to the old ways ...
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  badolputtytat

  ummm.... what size batteries does it use? And where do you put the memory card in?

  Jes kiddin'.... yes I remember them. No, I don't know exactly what to do with it?

  puttytat
• 

  Special K

  I remember one of those rulers.

  The elders used them at the Kingdom Hall to measure if the sisters dresses were just the right length , dresses couldn't be too short you know.

  Or to measure the brothers hair length, especially around the ears and around the back of the neck.

  special K
• 

  Special K

  Those are what the governing body of Jehovahs Witnesses use.

  .....SLIDE..... RULES.....

  special k
• 

  ignorance is strength

  I'm glad I don't have to use that in school. I use a Texas Insturments TI-83 graphing calculator and couldn't live without it.
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  arrowstar

  I haven't seen one of those in years. I used one...probably still could.

  Lisa
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  Thirdson

  I remember them but I don't think I could use one that well now. I took 2 math classes in high school and in the one final exam we were allowed to use electronic calculators. I borrowed my dad's big clunky one. At college I had an LED scientific calculator that ate 2 AA batteries every month and took 5 seconds to calculate 69! I only had that about 2 years when I bought an LCD scientific calculator. That must have been 1979 and I still have it today. I have replaced the battery several times and it still works despite a kid playing with it, full immersion in water, being dropped, and being covered in sawdust...I keep it in my tool box.

  Thirdson

  PS Recently I was in an art supply store (in St. Paul) that sold all sorts of junk items. I picked up a pack of 80 column computer punch cards for 50 cents and took them to work. The first program I ever wrote was 90 lines long and I hand punched the cards. There were a couple of us who remembered punch cards .