by JH 29 Replies latest jw friends
Amazing and maxwell, then I daresay you also became proficient with the circular slide rule?
LT, I had a wooden one too! Prob a collector's item now.
Dang it, 3rdSon, there ya had to go and mention punch cards...ever do any Fortran?
LOL...ahhh, the memories
Craig (of the HP49G class)
Here in Oz, we had a DO who used a slide rule, or any kind of ruler, to measure the lengths of sisters' skirts!!!
what the? i've never seen one of these before
Unless there was one or two people who kept their talents secret, in my entire life I have not known a single person -- not one -- who could do anything more with a slide rule beyond using it as a straight edge to draw lines on a piece of notebook paper. You might as well as given me an abacus.
Teejay,
I remember my two older brothers (Firstson and Secondson, would you believe) doing their homework with slide rules in hand and not just drawing lines with them. They also wrote Latin with fountain pens. By the time I was in secondary school, Latin was not a required subject, ballpoint pens were acceptable and calculators were just coming on the market.
In the 70s I read a short Sci-Fi story about a spaceship that lost its main and only computer. The crew was forced to calculate their course with banks of slide rule calculations. I guess the storyteller never envisioned the ubiquity of the microprocessor and computer. (Manned space flight is nowhere near as advanced as I thought it would be either though. It’s been nearly 35 years since men orbited the moon and we have not ventured beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo program.)
Craig,
I never did anything with FORTRAN. The first computer I worked on was an IBM system of early 70s technology (I can't remember what it was). It had a typewriter interactive interface. The computer was restarted everyday and "boot" pack was 6 inches thick. (Don't ever drop the cards on the floor and have to resort them)
Thirdson
I remember slide rules. But I never did figure out how to use them.
I remember punch cards as well from high school computer science class. I was the only girl in the class. We learned how to program in BASIC and FORTRAN.
I don't remember any of it now. LOL
Love, Scully
onacruse,
The circular rule is outside of my experience. Never heard of that one. The only reason I have the slide rule is because my dad gave it to me.
Ah FORTRAN, didn't do anything with that except try to translate a simple statistical program to C from FORTRAN once. It was in a numerical recipes book, and it would have been simpler to just get the C version of the book, but it wasn't in the library for some reason. I went on a field trip the summer of 1994 to the Memphis Wastewater treatment plant. They had a big old ancient computer running FORTRAN programs controlling their operations. I suppose state of the art computers aren't particularly necessary when treating sewage. I wouldn't be surprised if they were still using it. I"ve seen the punchcards and heard the stories but never did anything with them.
Maxwell
still have my HP48GX from college, but is not used for anything more than balancing my checkbook these days. seems like such a waste of computing power.
I have never used a slide rule and don't know how they work. I would like to cast another vote for the HP48GX calculator. I love that thing!! Long live RPN!
Yes - owned one (Faber Castell I think) and used at work -- then cheap calculators came very quickly after that
I still keep my slide rule in my desk! It reminds me of how much things have changed in my lifetime.
I was taught how to use one in school (early 1970s) and then went on to use one every day at work when I worked in biochemistry for a while.
Like Amazing, I also had a circular slide rule but I must have lost at some point.
The first electronic calculator I had cost the equivalent of a week’s wage. Since about that time I have worked in computing, programming in everything from COBOL to what I use today, Java.
Going off topic slightly, who remembers using log tables? I used to put a little mark under every value I looked up, hoping I guess one day to lay claim to having looked up every single log value! I can’t think I ever did manage that feat though.
Eyeslice
