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Total posts : 45366That is remarkable.
Total posts : 45366By the time I entered high school I had mastered the slide rule. Someone had given me an 8 inch K&E. When I was discovered using it in class I was told not to do so because it gave me an unfair advantage over my classmates. My thought at the time was that they could also learn the slide rule and quit wasting time doing math we already knew how to do but such was not to be. I had to accommodate the lowest common denominator.
In our math classroom we had a huge demonstrator slide rule (8 or 10 feet long) hanging on the wall. I don’t know why since none of the teachers knew how to use one and it just hung there. It came in handy on tests because I could read the logarithms off the L scales from across the room, do multiply and divide by adding and subtracting, and converting back. This saved an immense amount of time with calculations.
In college, it was the norm to attach your slide rule in its case to your belt and walk around campus with it dangling. No wonder engineering students had little social life. It was said that when visitors came to campus they were told “Those are engineering students….do not get too close to them.” I believe it was my class year classmates and I who stopped carrying them this way and we did get dates.
Neil
Total posts : 45366My first exposure was in U.S. Navy Aviation Electronics Technician School, in Millington, TN. The program was a Class B school known as AFTA or Advanced First Term Avionics. We also has the 8-10 foot slide-rule but the instructors knew how to use it it. LOL! Mine was a Pickett N1010.
http://sliderulemuseum.com/Manuals/Pickett_N1010-ES_Trig_DonatedByAlWhite_Retail_Box_Insert.jpg
Total posts : 45366Mine was/is a Post Versatrig 1450. I still have it, but didn’t need to use it much after scientific calculators were introduced.
One of my early calculators was an HP21, which uses reverse Polish notation. RPN took a little getting used to, but did speed up the calculation entry process. I still have that one, too, from 1975.
Total posts : 45366You are correct. I was hard to get used to. A fellow enigineer I work and shared a cube with at Paradyne had one. He loved it but he was a bit out there. I think his was aHP as well.
Total posts : 45366We’ve been accused of sliding on the rules.
Total posts : 45366RPN calculators are great. I have used them for a long time and still have two that work. In fact, there was a method of using a slide rule, which I think was called chaining, which also speeded up calculations though it was not RPN. If I recall right this was used when you had products over products and it was faster to do each quotient rather than do the top and bottom products. Similar to RPN this put the answer you needed from the preceding operation at the scale “1” so it was ready for the next operation.
Back in the day when nurses in our ICU did drug mixing the decision was made to teach them how to use slide rules for the calculations required. We bought a crate of small plastic Picketts for a couple of bucks each and guess who was assigned to teach them how to use them (the engineer on faculty instead of the MDs). Some struggled but most adapted quite well when they saw how much easier slide rules were compared to pencil and paper.
Neil
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