wolfenshire posted at 2:04PM Tue, 29 May 2018 - #4330787

diogenese19348 posted at 12:48PM Tue, 29 May 2018 - #4330767

I never took to those newfangled calculators, A slide rule was good enough for my grand-pappy, and good enough for me! :P

Ha, that's funny. My grandfather was an engineer. He tried to teach me to use a slide rule. He eventually got frustrated with me and gave me a bowl of marbles and told me to just use those to count with. I rather enjoyed my bowl of marbles.

I was a Freshman in college when the Texas Instruments SR-10 came out. It did addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square roots (which was the important part) and cost $150. The SR 50 came out in my junior year. Slide rules were still sold in the student book store, and some professors claimed they were far superior to calculators because as one put it "What if you're out in a field and the batteries die in your calculator?". We programmed on Punch Cards then, CRT terminals didn't come out until my Junior Year also. You submitted a punch card deck to operations, and would get the resulting printout the next day.

On the other hand, playing Zork was a blast.

Times have changed just a bit...