For those of you who are not familiar with a slide rule or what it does, it is a non electronic device used to do certain mathematical functions such as multiplication, division, logarithms, root functions, etc.
A new K&E bamboo slide rule got me my first 'A' in college. I self taught myself, with the help of a book, how to use the slide rule in high school. When I got to college one of my classes dealt with learning the slide rule. The instructor asked if any of us knew how to use the slide rule and a couple of us raised our hands. He than gave us a short test which I passed. He told me that there wasn't anything more that he could teach me and excused me from class the rest of the semester. Unfortunately though, the rest of my classes weren't quite so easy.
The electronic calculator arrived in the late 60's and ended up replacing the slide rule by the early 70's. The calculator, even though it was more expensive, could make calculations with greater accuracy than what the slide rule could. One would think that it would be faster but that was not necessarily the case, at least not with the early calculators. A person who knew how to use a slide rule could be as fast, or faster, than a person using an electronic calculator. The big difference, however, is that the slide rule was only accurate to only 3, maybe 4 digits whereas the calculator was very accurate up to 8 or 10 digits. Big advantage.
I bought my first hand held calculator in 1972 and paid around $130 dollars for it. It was a LED device (red numbers), had 1 memory location, and was capable of the four basic mathematical functions plus it had a square root function. It was unable, however, to accomplish any scientific functions. For that I would go back to using the slide rule.
There were scientific calculators available by the early 70's. One was produced by Texas Instruments and the other by Hewett Packard. Both cost close to $1000.00. The Texas Instrument (TI-59) calculator had 960 memory locations and you could program it to calculate many different types of formulas/programs. These formulas/programs could be saved on little magnetic tape strips about 2 inches long. This would allow you to load your program back in for future use. This was probably the best programmable hand held calculator ever built, at least it was for its time. I bought one of these calculators for less than half price from a friend who had gotten 2 of them as gifts from his family. I used this calculator for several years as an engineer for Sperry Univac. Scientific calculators like this can now be bought at about any store for less than $20.00. With the constant changes in technology, today's computer programs and laptop computers are replacing the hand held calculators. I expect that it won't be very many years before the hand held calculator will disappear like the slide rule did back in the early to mid seventies.I still have several hand held calculators which I seldom use because the same functions are so readily available on Windows computers or even on my iPhone. Actually, these hand held calculators are most likely in dire need of batteries. I do, however, have tabletop calculators that I use frequently. And I still have my old slide rule and occasionally I bring it out and play with it, if nothing more than just for the sake of nostalgia. I have to think my way through things and I do not remember how to use all of its functionality and, although my slide rule ability today is a far cry from when I used it to get through calculus and electronics, I can still do basic calculations on the thing.
The calculator replaced the slide rule. The PC is replacing calculators. So now I am wondering? What is going to replace the PC?
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