07-21-2010, 12:35 PM | #76 |
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I actually still have my Grandfather's ivory slide rule. quite elegant!
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07-21-2010, 01:04 PM | #77 |
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07-21-2010, 07:47 PM | #78 |
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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career as a young cadet in a local government drawing office waaayyy back in the early 80's. By then, slide rules had been replaced by HP calculators (I got mine for AU$113 in 1985) and a basic86 based discless XT PC was the cruncher of choice for road design.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. |
07-21-2010, 09:12 PM | #79 |
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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 |
07-22-2010, 09:43 AM | #80 | |
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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. |
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07-22-2010, 09:50 AM | #81 |
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I guess you could use a larger slide rule to kill rabbits
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07-22-2010, 10:07 AM | #82 |
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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!
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07-22-2010, 10:40 AM | #83 | |
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"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. |
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07-22-2010, 02:05 PM | #84 |
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Yes, many of those lurid covers were painted by Earle K. Bergey, the "inventor of the brass brassière"
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07-22-2010, 04:35 PM | #85 | |
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______ Dennis Who drooled over a Pickett Log Log Decitrig rule, back when... |
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07-22-2010, 05:03 PM | #86 |
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There is an interesting specialized slide rule you can print out and assemble here:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/brico.html |
07-25-2010, 10:23 PM | #87 | |
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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. |
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07-25-2010, 11:48 PM | #88 | |
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I also remember programming with punch cards. That was fun...not.... |
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07-26-2010, 05:11 AM | #89 |
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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?
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07-26-2010, 05:35 AM | #90 |
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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.
Last edited by mike_bike_kite; 07-26-2010 at 05:39 AM. |
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