Have you ever used one of these? Tools from the past.
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- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- Back before electronic calculators were invented, slide rules were the main tool for making scientific and engineering calculations. While you could make calculations manually with paper and pencil, it was slow process. Mainframe computers were available after about the 1940s or '50s, but these aren't easy to use for simple calculations. Using a slide rule could really speed up the work. I chose to use this in my channel avatar because I was the last graduating class in my high school in the mid-1970s to learn and be required to use this tool in my classes. The following year, scientific calculators were required. As I went to engineering classes in college, they were required for certain classes, depending on the professor. So, I came of age with a foot in both camps--the old way and the start of the new technology. It seemed fitting to recognize where I began my technical journey.
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Old joke. Ask an engineer what's 2x2, he whips out his slide rule and says 3.9
Some people easily discard this object as "obsolete" but they should remember that it are exactly these "calculators" that made space traveling possible, as well as sending probes into deep space and keeping the International Space Station in orbit. And then there are the thousands of ways in which they have contributed to the modern ages. No, not obsolete but indeed important, extremely important.
I started college fall term of 1972. One of my first classes was slide rule use. I had a Post Versalog II which I had bought at my HS store. My professor checked our work with a four-function calculator he built from a kit advertised in the back of Popular Electronics magazine. My first slide rule was 6" Sterling 587 just like yours. I bought it in the fifth grade and learned how to use it on my own, with only the supplied instruction sheet. I still have that slide rule.
Do folks here remember the giant slide rules hanging in classrooms? They were used for teaching and often found in math and science classrooms. I think it would be cool having one of those hanging in my den.
Anyone else remember the 5’ or 6’ long slide rules that the teachers would use? They’d hang from hooks over the chalkboard…
When I was doing year 12, we had to fight for the right to use a slide rule in the exams. They said it would give an unfair advantage
I graduated high school in 1976. The last day of math class the teacher collected the slide rules and said, "These are getting put away, next year we are switching to calculators".
I graduated High School in 79. In the Navy in electronics school, we used scientific calculators. Which I had never seen before. But all our electronic calculations were done on these. Later, when I entered the Army (89), I was branched into Field Artillery. In Artillery school, we used slide rules for everything when computing data for the guns/howitzers. It was months of training in what was then called "manual gunnery" I am glad we did, in the last 4 weeks of Artillery school we learned computers for gunfire control. But the slide rules gave us a firm foundation in the basics of controlling the fire of large guns before we went on to computers.
Back when you had to know math to use a math tool. You don't need to know anything to use a calculator...nearly nothing.
We called them slipsticks.
I finished high school in Australia in 1970.
I worked in IT until I was 68. Almost all of the other 18 or so members of the staff were half my age or less. Once I mentioned a slide rule in a meeting. No one knew what it was. They called me grandpa and would often ask for advice, but I often had trouble translating what I was telling them to their experience. Time moves on to new roads and the old ones fall to dust.
When I was in school math was not the strongest subject. T may teacher wanted the answer out to four decimal places. He said if you use a slide rule you only need three places. I learned that slide rule fast. It helped me later when I had to use an E6B slide calculator.
I had a slide rule way back when I first started university. I couldn't do much with it, and for me showing it simply meant I was smart. Looking back at that time and reflecting on the beginning of my teaching career in the late 70s to mid 80s, the Rubic's cube amongst students took on the same feel: to be seen as smart everyone had to have one dangling from their clothing showing it had been solved. A student of mine that occasionally caused me problems had one that was always in the solved position. On one such problematic time I asked to see it and proceeded to scramble it. The look of panic on that student's face was amazing. Later in the day I noticed the cube was back in the solved position, and I learned that most students were just pulling off the little cubes and sticking them back in the solved position.
Dad was an engineer and bought me my first slide rule when I was 13 in 1961. I bought a new one in 1965 when I started training as an electronics tech. I still have Dad’s Hemmi bamboo slide rule, in its leather case.
I'm 71 and still have 2 slide rules somewhere. My kids will think they're mysterious when I pass and they have to clear out my stuff. My first calculator was a Rockwell LED display and it was fantastic.
Thanks for the nostalgia! Thru HS (1965 grad), slide was virtually grafted to my hands. Plastic. Now lemmee throw a curveball--- if you wanted to be a
No batteries required. I was taught how to use a slip stick in college. I still have it...somewhere. After graduating I put the slip stick away and never looked back. Great video thumbs up.
What I like about the Slide rule is that one needs to mentally keep track of the decimal place unlike the calculator. This helps one to concentrate and sharpen one's mind.
Thanks for refreshing memories of my days in technical college mid 60’s working metric and imperial calculations in slide