SciFi history?

[kindlekitten]

I actually still have my Grandfather's ivory slide rule. quite elegant!

[nyrath]

I'm fond of Nomograms myself.

http://www.projectrho.com/nomogram/index.html

[sabredog]

I started my civil engineering career as a young cadet in a local government drawing office waaayyy back in the early 80's. By then, slide rules had been replaced by HP calculators (I got mine for AU$113 in 1985) and a basic86 based discless XT PC was the cruncher of choice for road design. I even prepared drawings on drafting film using a drafting board/machine and drawing pens.

Five years later, I was designing on a 286 PC.

The great SF books of the "classic" era still had their heroes using slide rules, blueprints and logarithmic tables. Computers with "visiplates" were mentioned but rarely explained.

What a long way we have come.

Now I hear that the technology to replicate what we saw in Avatar with a finger swipe to drag data from a desktop monitor to a tablet is nearly here.

[Metal Mick]

Hi all,

my first introduction to computers (1976!) was on an HP "Desktop Calculator" - a thing the size of a suitcase, with a cassette drive on the left and right. I was working for a government research establishment. The cassettes were for loading programs. The screen was tiny and displayed text only, but joy of joys, there was a racing-car game: turn-based, a plotter would mark where your car was on a racetrack, after you input steering-wheel angles, percentage acceleration (negative for braking), and other bits and pieces. With 4 players, a lap would take an hour to complete.

A scientist in the facility postulated there would always be a place for "hybrid" computers - a combination of digital and analog (where circuitry was used to perform complex mathematics, that were beyond the digital machine to process accurately and quickly). By the mid-1980's, he was proved wrong.

Oh, I still have a slide rule that I bought for high school. I tried showing show it worked to my young daughter and she asked, "Why would you use that instead of a calculator?"

Cheers,

Michael P

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

Oh, I still have a slide rule that I bought for high school. I tried showing show it worked to my young daughter and she asked, "Why would you use that instead of a calculator?"

The calculator requires infrastructure.

If a global universal OMG catastrophe reduces us all to living in a world similar to The Road Warrior, the calculator will be worthless once all the batteries are gone, but the slide rule will still work.

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by nyrath

The calculator requires infrastructure.

If a global universal OMG catastrophe reduces us all to living in a world similar to The Road Warrior, the calculator will be worthless once all the batteries are gone, but the slide rule will still work.

I guess you could use a larger slide rule to kill rabbits

[Worldwalker]

Who needs a global catastrophe? Having your calculator batteries die during a final is sufficient. Or so I was told by my high school chemistry teacher. This did not motivate me to get any better with a slide rule; it motivated me to carry spare batteries on exam days!

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It was not helped by the lurid covers of older SF magazines featuring scantily clad heroines menaced by slavering aliens.

One of my favorite family stories involves the moment my grandmother noticed a magazine that held my grandfather's rapt attention. The cover featured a large, green BEM ("bug-eyed monster," for the uninitiated) drooling as his sucker-tipped tentacles ripped the bodice off a helpless-yet-alluring ingénue. Classic stuff, in other words.

"David," she asked, "don't you think the subject matter is a little lurid for you to be reading in front of the children?"

"No," he responded, with just a touch of regret, "it's pure as the driven snow...."

- M.

[nyrath]

Yes, many of those lurid covers were painted by Earle K. Bergey, the "inventor of the brass brassière"

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Recently, there was an article in Scientific American, I believe which included a slide rule which one could cut out and assemble.

Or print your own here:

http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/build.html

Lovely. Thank you!
______
Dennis
Who drooled over a Pickett Log Log Decitrig rule, back when...

[nyrath]

There is an interesting specialized slide rule you can print out and assemble here:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/brico.html

[Roger Parkinson]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

Hi all,

my first introduction to computers (1976!) was on an HP "Desktop Calculator" - a thing the size of a suitcase, with a cassette drive on the left and right.

Hey, I remember using one of those (same year). I was supposed to be studying Earth Science but I was walking past one of the Chem labs and saw this thing through the window. And (oh joy!) the door was unlocked. I spent hours programming that thing. The graph plotter was just magic.

Talking of slide rules I have an old Astounding mag and on the cover is a piratical figure climbing over the gunwhales with, not a dagger, a sliderule between his teeth. The title story is something like Space Pirates.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Roger Parkinson

Talking of slide rules I have an old Astounding mag and on the cover is a piratical figure climbing over the gunwhales with, not a dagger, a sliderule between his teeth. The title story is something like Space Pirates.

Glad I am not the only one to remember that!

I also remember programming with punch cards. That was fun...not....

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Glad I am not the only one to remember that!

I also remember programming with punch cards. That was fun...not....

Programming with punch cards wasn't bad (except the time I dropped a whole box down the stairs!) ... but have you ever had to get a lace card out of a cardreader? With tweezers?

[mike_bike_kite]

The machine I learnt to program on was an Acorn System 1. It just had a hex keypad and a little LED display. It had 1k of memory but, when you're programming directly in machine code, that seemed like a lot. This same computer was the computer used in the SciFi TV series Blake's Seven.