Slide Rules and Slipsticks - in the 1960's B.C. - i.e. (Before Computers)
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In hind sight, I found the girls turned and went the other way when we came down the hall. I wonder why  Don Anderson
On Friday, March 12, 2021, 11:56:39 a.m. MST, ap@... <ap@...> wrote:
So I am months away from getting my AP mount and thought I would have nothing to contribute to this forum until today. But here it is.
And unlike others, you can see the scars from use on my case. The HP35 did not come into availability until something like my 3rd year.
I will say, however, that I did not find it exactly a chick magnet. I went to UVa, and it was the very early days of women in the undergraduate program, so they were few enough, but even fewer in the Engineering school. Even so, I saw no indication the slide rule had any attractive force.
Of course, being in the Engineer school the women there had slide rules as well, so that may have affected any behavioral observations.
Linwood
PS. Isn’t it odd that we all probably had a dozen or more calculators in the interim and I suspect rarely saved them when replaced, but many of us saved the slide rule. I wonder if my son would even know what it was if he saw it.
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I did my first programing in Fortran with punch cards on an IBM360. woe be to the person who dropped their program on the way to class!. Sorting a couple hundred punch cards 10 min before class started was stressful! Don Anderson
On Friday, March 12, 2021, 11:57:15 a.m. MST, Jeffrey Wolff <jmw2800@...> wrote:
I had to use a slide rule in high school. I remember my Dad buying a basic four function calculator when I was finishing high school. I learned about HP calculator's in college and bought 3 different programmable calculators by the time I graduated. My first drafting class was using paper, pencils and a bunch of tools to make lines and circles. Eventually did AutoCAD and digital circuit design. Started programming computers using punch cards. Eventually got my masters in Computer Science and spent my working life running networks, switches, routers, firewalls, wireless, fiber optics and other stuff to bring the Internet to everybody at the university. Been working at my employer since 1989. We went from 1.5 megabits/second for the whole state higher education network to a pair of 100 gigabit/second Internet2 circuits now. |
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Jeffrey Wolff
I had to use a slide rule in high school. I remember my Dad buying a basic four function calculator when I was finishing high school.
I learned about HP calculator's in college and bought 3 different programmable calculators by the time I graduated. My first drafting class was using paper, pencils and a bunch of tools to make lines and circles. Eventually did AutoCAD and digital circuit design. Started programming computers using punch cards. Eventually got my masters in Computer Science and spent my working life running networks, switches, routers, firewalls, wireless, fiber optics and other stuff to bring the Internet to everybody at the university. Been working at my employer since 1989. We went from 1.5 megabits/second for the whole state higher education network to a pair of 100 gigabit/second Internet2 circuits now. |
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ap@CaptivePhotons.com
So I am months away from getting my AP mount and thought I would have nothing to contribute to this forum until today. But here it is.
And unlike others, you can see the scars from use on my case. The HP35 did not come into availability until something like my 3rd year.
I will say, however, that I did not find it exactly a chick magnet. I went to UVa, and it was the very early days of women in the undergraduate program, so they were few enough, but even fewer in the Engineering school. Even so, I saw no indication the slide rule had any attractive force.
Of course, being in the Engineer school the women there had slide rules as well, so that may have affected any behavioral observations.
Linwood
PS. Isn’t it odd that we all probably had a dozen or more calculators in the interim and I suspect rarely saved them when replaced, but many of us saved the slide rule. I wonder if my son would even know what it was if he saw it.
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Yes Joe anyone under 50 (probably 60) has no idea what were talking about. Think about the things that were built ie Hoover Dam Titanic etc that were all designed using hand calculations and slide rules. What most people don't realize about slide rules was one had to have a good idea what the final answer was while doing the calcs in order to carry the decimal point through the calculation process. Don Anderson
On Friday, March 12, 2021, 10:28:54 a.m. MST, Joe Zeglinski <j.zeglinski@...> wrote:
Don
Love it – dem’ was the days of real computing, unlimited
memory, and engineering hard drive.
Yours looks like the famous, highly desired ... K & E
Log-Log-DeciTrig-Duplex “slip-stick”. Engineers weren’t really entitled to
own one of those, unless they could say that quickly, with a drink in
their hand.
Way cool Pickett man myself – its case, almost
like having it slip into “Corinthian leather”, but probably just cowhide
:-)
K&E rare Bamboo style was fine ... but Pickett’s
unique engineering design with its specially chosen Green spectral colour, for
easy visibility with bleary eyes when cramming in the middle of the night,
Magnesium alloy with tiny ball bearings at the slide’s ends for high speed
computing – engineering heaven. Works on both east and west side of its
cursor, easily finds home position on reboot, even works inverted for the
log-log and exponential functions ... and BEST of all ... never
needs AeroShell-33 relubrication :-)
However, my Radio Astronomy engineering prof, used his
Abacus, to prove I didn’t need to always run his 3C-273 strip chart data through
the PDP-11. I think his was an 8-Bead, (later called a Byte), “flip-stick”
calculator.
Joe Z.
From: Don Anderson via groups.io
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2021 11:17 AM
To: main@ap-gto.groups.io
Subject: Re: [ap-gto] Quick Release Gearbox Modification for Older
AP1600
You mean like this?
Don
Anderson On Friday, March 12, 2021, 07:57:25 a.m. MST, George
<george@...> wrote:
Don,
They were only cool if they were full. <G> …but real cool was the slide rule slung from your belt in its case! Talk about a chick magnet…ah, the old days! Regards, George George Whitney Astro-Physics, Inc.
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Joe Zeglinski
Don
Love it – dem’ was the days of real computing, unlimited
memory, and engineering hard drive.
Yours looks like the famous, highly desired ... K & E
Log-Log-DeciTrig-Duplex “slip-stick”. Engineers weren’t really entitled to
own one of those, unless they could say that quickly, with a drink in
their hand.
Way cool Pickett man myself – its case, almost
like having it slip into “Corinthian leather”, but probably just cowhide
:-)
K&E rare Bamboo style was fine ... but Pickett’s
unique engineering design with its specially chosen Green spectral colour, for
easy visibility with bleary eyes when cramming in the middle of the night,
Magnesium alloy with tiny ball bearings at the slide’s ends for high speed
computing – engineering heaven. Works on both east and west side of its
cursor, easily finds home position on reboot, even works inverted for the
log-log and exponential functions ... and BEST of all ... never
needs AeroShell-33 relubrication :-)
However, my Radio Astronomy engineering prof, used his
Abacus, to prove I didn’t need to always run his 3C-273 strip chart data through
the PDP-11. I think his was an 8-Bead, (later called a Byte), “flip-stick”
calculator.
Joe Z.
From: Don Anderson via groups.io
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2021 11:17 AM
To: main@ap-gto.groups.io
Subject: Re: [ap-gto] Quick Release Gearbox Modification for Older
AP1600
You mean like this?
Don
Anderson On Friday, March 12, 2021, 07:57:25 a.m. MST, George
<george@...> wrote:
Don,
They were only cool if they were full. <G> …but real cool was the slide rule slung from your belt in its case! Talk about a chick magnet…ah, the old days! Regards, George George Whitney Astro-Physics, Inc.
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