Slide Rules....Anyone remember them?

[woodsprite]

Funny the things one thinks about when renovating. Firstly, was cleaning up the old mantle piece in the last room to get done, and as I cleaned off the old gunk, it brought back a heap of memories from my younger days...candles burining in the tops of empty port bottles and dripping wax onto the mantle, fag ends scorching the mantle, countless arms of friends draped over the mantle in front of the open fire, heaps of great memories.

And then, for no reason - Slide Rules! Does anyone remember the days of these creatures, and how much fun one could have (or not have) with them? I still have my very expensive Faber Castel? from Form 3, but don;t use it. My 17 year old son couldn't work out what it was for, how it worked, and certainly didn't believe the accuracy of the implement in the hands of a good operator - not me, I had trouble doing additions on the thing!

I guess calculators are more convenient, give better accuracy, and are a heap more versatile, but gee, the old slide rule was fun in its day.

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

Yep. Have a 12" Hemmi engineers rule if front of me even as I type. I use it regularly in the shed when making my guesstimates... more to check that I've got the magnitudes right in my mental maths than anything.

Far quicker than rummaging through the house looking for a calculator and batteries or waiting for Windoze to boot.

I guess calculators are more convenient, give better accuracy, and are a heap more versatile, but gee, the old slide rule was fun in its day.

Gotta disagree with part of this. They're only as accurate as the numbers punched in. All too often I've read an answer back from a calculator and the ol' grey matter has jumped in saying "that's not right!" because I always run a mental guesstimate first.

On the other hand, the kids'll quite happily accept the answer as given, after all "the calculator doesn't make mistakes."

[jmk89]

Yep, like you I still have my Faber Castell from 3rd Form. I still use it for all sorts of things. The best thing is that once you set the particular factor that you are multiplying or dividing by, you don't need to do anything more - just read off all the results. When you are working with a scaling issue, this is a great facility.

AS Skew said, the other advantage is that it is a great check on your numbers to ensure that your order of magnitude is correct. In fact, I use a calculator and a slide rule together - set the rule to check the mental arithmetic and then, if I need the exact number calculate it. The calulator I use is also a legacy of education - it was bought only 4 years after the slide rule when I was doing 1st year maths at Uni. I haven't ever felt the need to update it (although I do use an HP 12C at work).

[Daddles]

I loved me old slide rule. I did matric when calculators weren't allowed - it was log book or slide rule. I was the only one using the slide rule. Still got about four of them in a bottom drawer somewhere.

Richard

[bennylaird]

When teaching maths at uni I had a faulty calculator. If a student forgot his I would lend it to him.

if he put in 6 x 9 and it said 42 they would accept it as fact.

[Andy Mac]

Yep, I used one in high school, and still have it somewhere, in its green sleeve with "Sly Drool" pasted on it. I think the last time I rediscovered it, 20yrs or so after using it in earnest, I couldn't remember how to do the simplest calculation!! But at least it never ran the batteries flat...

Cheers,

[bennylaird]

The old fig 4 tables were good too, have not seen a copy for years now.

Makes it hard to teach decibels and logarithmic scales these days as the kids have no idea.

[silentC]

How do you know when you're an old phart?

When you can remember using a slide rule

I was in high school the first year they allowed calculators in the HSC maths exam. Everyone in the class was expected to buy a calculator. Casio fx36 I think. We had a whole subject on how to use one. There was a chapter in the textbook.

One of my mates had his older brother's slide rule. He thought he was clever because he knew how to use it. He wasn't. He was a nerd!!

[bennylaird]

Is that like remembering Pounds Schillings and pence? The walk down to the back of the yard to the long drop and newspaper rather than a roll. Dripping sandwiches for school lunch. Cream in a bucket from the farm over the road. Being able to leave the door unlocked. A copper giving you a kick in the ar...e rather than booking you when you played up. Petrol needing to be pumped up to the top of the bowser with a hand pump then allowed to run down into the tank. The wonderful smell of the steam train in the station...........etc etc

[Wood Borer]

You old pharts.

I have four or five or them also including the Faber Castell that I used in Leaving and HSC and Uni before you were allowed to used calculators. There weren't any to use apart from the HP with the Nixi tubes.

[echnidna]

they make good paint stirrers nowadays

[bennylaird]

Just so the youngsters know what we are talking about:confused: :confused:

[Stuart]

Played with one, learnt some basics on it, but calculators were coming..... Still have the table book though, so I sorta fell in the gap between slide rules and calculators. Still remember buying my first calculator - $15 and it could + - / x and square root, and that was about it, oh, and it knew Pi.

[bennylaird]

3.1415926535897932.................................?

[bennylaird]

Ask a kid these days to give you the exact answer to the sin of 60 degrees, tell them they are wrong if they give you it from a calculator to only 10 decimal places


Only accept an answer of root 3 on 2.