Why a slide rule is better than a computer

[BobG]

Those of use who couldn't afford a $200-$300 calculator had to use slide rules, even though we had access to computers - via remote terminals using dial-up and acoustic modems at ~300 baud.

Anyone remember time sharing on computers.?

How about punching paper tape or punch cards?

Reason 16: When you drop a slide rule, the numbers are still in the same order when you pick it up as they were before you dropped it.

 

[turbo]

Anyone remember time sharing on computers.?

How about punching paper tape or punch cards?

When I was in engineering school, calculators were forbidden, so we used slide rules. Engineering students were required to learn an entry-level computer language (CUPL) and then move on to FORTRAN. We'd write out our code by hand, then transcribe it onto punch-cards with big console-sized writers. Then you submit your stack of cards to the acolytes of the computer god, and hope you get a nice big stack of green and white printout in a couple of days, instead of an error log. Troubleshooting code was not such a big problem, but you had to right onto it because of the lag time in getting the corrected code re-processed - in time to submit the results to the prof.

 

[Astronuc]

I had a strong dislike for the SYS and PROC cards. I probably never took the right class.

To save money, we were supposed to use 24 or 48 hr turn around time, or run at night between midnight and 0600.

I seem to remember in my freshman year that we couldn't use calculators because not everyone had them, so we used slide rules. By my sophomore year, everyone had a basic calculator.

 

[Astronuc]

You ruined my joke.

Sorry. It went way over my head.

In my day, they geeks were the guys who wore their slide rules on their belts. They were usually the first to get calculators, and they wore them on their belts as well.

 

[Evo]

Sorry. It went way over my head.

Well, I'm not saying it was a good joke.

 

[Evo]

Anyone remember rotary calculators?

http://www.mortati.com/glusker/elecmech/rotary/DiehlDSR18.htm

I used an old manual one back in the early 70's in college for a business class.

Here's some nostalgia.

http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/before.html

 

[turbo]

Anyone remember rotary calculators?

http://www.mortati.com/glusker/elecmech/rotary/DiehlDSR18.htm

I used an old manual one back in the early 70's in college for a business class.

Here's some nostalgia.

http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/before.html

These old machines were work-horses, and problems (work) had to be structured to take advantage of the features of the machines. Nowadays, computers are multi-purpose and can tackle problems in ways that are limited mostly by the inventiveness of the programmers.

About 1980, I did a heat-and-mass balance on the multiple water systems of a very large pulp mill. Thankfully, a junior engineer in my department was a whiz with FORTRAN and he helped structure my submissions to SAS so that we got reasonably accurate results. Identifying and reducing inefficiencies in water usage and heat use/reclamation can be worth $$$$$ in a big mill like that, so it was an important year-long study. Still, I felt like I was back in college a decade earlier, submitting data and processing instructions, and waiting for the printout.

 

[Moonbear]

I had a strong dislike for the SYS and PROC cards. I probably never took the right class.

When I first had to learn to run SAS for my statistics in grad school, I probably spent a year head scratching, wondering why someone would come up with such bizarre command lines to tell it what to do...use PROC to tell it which analysis to run, then type in CARDS to tell it you were going to input data...I kept wondering, why not DATA?? (I recall INPUT meant something else, but have fortunately had much more user-friendly software for a while now, so don't recall all the commands anymore.) FINALLY, my mentor clued me in that the terms were carry overs from when stats were run on computers using punch cards.

 

[turbo]

In the days of slide rules, calculation power was distributed (unless you were the US military and could afford analog vacuum-tube computers that filled a building just to do ballistics for naval guns), and when 4-function calculators came out, slide rules were still a lot handier for a lot of stuff, but calculation power was still distributed. At the time, real time-intensive calculations (especially recursive stuff that could loop over and over) were concentrated in mainframes, and it wasn't until the advent of the PC that you could break that dependence on punch-cards, batching jobs, and sharing time on some centralized (regional) computer. By the time 1988 came around, I had already bought a 286-based PC with a 20 meg hard-drive, and taught myself how to write executables running under Ashton-Tate dBase. I quit my job in a paper mill and started doing custom programming for local business. My PC at that time (less than 20 years ago) was state-of-the-art and cost me over $5000 with a color monitor (rare at the time) and a dot-matrix printer. That was a HUGE investment.

 

[Astronuc]

Anyone remember rotary calculators?

http://www.mortati.com/glusker/elecmech/rotary/DiehlDSR18.htm

I used an old manual one back in the early 70's in college for a business class.

Here's some nostalgia.

http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/before.html

The stepfather of one of my friends was a surveyor, and he had a Monroe Manual Rotary Calculator. I used mess around on it. It was impressive to see that thing work!

 

[D H]

I did a summer program ('74) in Nuclear and Electrical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines between my junior and senior years of high school.

Small world, summer of '72. Calculus in two weeks and then six weeks of digital electronics and nuclear physics. One guy had a calculator. Good memories!

I bought my first calculator shortly after returning. It could add, subtract, multiply, and even divide, and cost around $150. The niftiest thing about it was that it stopped working after a less than six months. What made it this failure so nifty was (1) the warranty was still in effect, and (2) the repair department lost it. After many months of wrangling, they eventually agreed to replace it with a new calculator worth around $150. That bulky four function calculator magically changed into a spanking new portable HP scientific calculator.

 

[Astronuc]

Small world, summer of '72. Calculus in two weeks and then six weeks of digital electronics and nuclear physics. One guy had a calculator. Good memories!

At CSM?! I stayed in Thomas Hall.

I bought my first calculator shortly after returning. It could add, subtract, multiply, and even divide, and cost around $150. The niftiest thing about it was that it stopped working after a less than six months. What made it this failure so nifty was (1) the warranty was still in effect, and (2) the repair department lost it. After many months of wrangling, they eventually agreed to replace it with a new calculator worth around $150. That bulky four function calculator magically changed into a spanking new portable HP scientific calculator.

Some guys have all the luck! I bought an SR-51, which subsequently died, then a TI-58, which died, then finally I wised up a bought an HP-41CX, which I still have 27 years later.

 

[D H]

At CSM?! I stayed in Thomas Hall.

At CSM! Hmm, I didn't realize until just now that I had quoted an old post. I guess BobG just had to brag about his big honking slide rule with 4 or 5 digit accuracy.

I still have the notes for the digital electronics half, including a class roster. I don't remember where I stayed, and its not in the notes either. I do remember getting quite proficient with the slide rule during those eight weeks. I still have one: Metal. My good bamboo one disappeared

 

[Astronuc]

Small world, summer of '72. Calculus in two weeks and then six weeks of digital electronics and nuclear physics. One guy had a calculator. Good memories!

Talk about a small world. That's the same program I was in. Professor Burnett taught the nuclear physics part. I still have my notebook.

Great memories! I met too really nice girls, Leah and Laura. I eventually took Leah to my high school prom. She lived about 90 miles from me when I lived in Texas.

 

[D H]

I did one that one at CSM and one at a close-by school in mathematics (I did non-Euclidean geometry) during the previous summer . I remember dozens of such programs across the country. I had my choice of CSM, LSU, and the University of Kansas between my junior and senior year in high school. http://www.igert.org/high school.asp?sort=cat&subsort=Physics" . Sad.

 

[BobG]

Anyone remember rotary calculators?

http://www.mortati.com/glusker/elecmech/rotary/DiehlDSR18.htm

I used an old manual one back in the early 70's in college for a business class.

Here's some nostalgia.

http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/before.html

Here's a good site for computer nostalgia: Columbia University Computing History

Plus a story on the joys of programming via punch card:
Programming with Punched Cards

They have pictures of the computers, punch card readers, etc, plus a picture of the first console/monitors they used. Believe it or not, the last time I used one of those monitors was about a year ago, when one of the work centers I help out in finally replaced their c.1980 system with an STK based system to do their orbital analysis work. Oh, the good old days when you could start a run and go surf the internet for up to an hour sometimes with nothing to do until the program finally finished. Now, with faster computers and better software, most of the runs finish in less than a minute - which also means we have time to create all kinds of new products and/or studies for the satellite control network, which means we spend the entire day working instead of surfing the net. Damn progress!

 

[Astronuc]

I did one that one at CSM and one at a close-by school in mathematics (I did non-Euclidean geometry) during the previous summer . I remember dozens of such programs across the country. I had my choice of CSM, LSU, and the University of Kansas between my junior and senior year in high school. http://www.igert.org/high school.asp?sort=cat&subsort=Physics" . Sad.

I was wondering if they still existed because I'd love to send my son to one. My brother did one in biology in Indiana, and he met the girl he eventually married (and they're still married after 30 years).

One of my HS classmates did a program at MIT, and he went there for his undergrad and grad programs.

Our high school really pushed us to do these programs. And about a dozen or so students went to different universities around the country.

 

[D H]

Rather than continue a hijack this old thread (mea kulpa for the hijack), I started https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=201105" that seem to have disappeared like slide rules and dinosaurs.