Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Kacir, if you don't mind me asking, where did you go to school that you had Russian calculators?
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It was (at that time) a socialistic country. My calculator was purchased directly in Soviet Union and brought here. It had keyboard marked in Azbuka (Cyrillic alphabet) which added to the uniqueness (and geekines ;-) ) of the calculator.
Later, (in second half of 1980s) it was possible to purchase Cassio and Texas instruments calculators here, for hefty sums, but I would not change my trusty RPN calculator for those "ordinary and boring" ones ;-).
Unfortunately, my calculator practically ATE batteries and most of the time I had to operate it from a small transformer from the mains. So during the tests I had to sit close to the power outlet ;-)
Our Math and Physics teacher was a dragoon. Much, much tougher and demanding than other teachers. When calculators became a bit more widespread she has put ban on the use of calculators. She caught one of my classmates as he was using his newfangled device for multiplying by 100.
She insisted that we solve all the tasks in a symbolic algebra, filling in numbers only as the very last step. She (rightly) thought that the use of the calculator makes pupils much more lazy in thinking about what should the result look like.
Much later, at the university, I almost brought tears to the eyes of one of my teachers when I was performing multiplication 17 x 25 from my head during lab work.
I was looking at the magnification number of my microscope and then I stood looking into distance. "What are you doing?"
"Multiplying magnification - 17 x 25 in my head"
"17 x 25 ?!? Your classmates are willing to use a calculator to multiply by 10."
"Easy. Look. Half of 17 is 8.5, half of that is 4.25, times 100 is 425"
;-)
I was cheating a little bit. I was always fascinated by mathematics, matematic tables, algebra, solving equations in symbolic form, use of slide rule and suchlike. So while I was in grammar school I have borrowed a book called
The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics by Jakow Trachtenberg (in original language!) and I tried hard to learn various tricks like this one to compute results in my head ;-)
Look at the page of the "younger brother" of my calculator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-52
Quote:
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The MK-52 was used as a backup to the onboard computers of the Soyuz spacecraft on the Soyuz TM-7 mission to the Mir space station.
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