Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for December 05, 2023

I still have mine, gathering dust on a bookshelf. I got it out awhile ago, and the only functions I could remember how to do were multiplying and dividing.

Run!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Slide rules rule!

At first, I thought it was Gumby.

Is the old remote in there, also?!

I know mine is around here somewhere. My first year in college (1972-73), it got me thru physics, but by the time I decided to major in engineering a few years later, I got a calculator. But we did get to the moon on the strength of slide rules, didn’t we?

He uses a calculator now. I still use pencil and paper, because I keep losing my calculator and forgetting that my phone has a calculator.

“Lately, you’ve seemed so distant.”

And to think that the moon landings were calculated using slipsticks…

They came out with circular slide rules when I was in high school. They fit inside your pocket protector perfectly

We were taught to use a simple one in our junior high school math class. This was in 1966.

Slide rules delivered 3-1/2 digits accuracy. Scientific implementation was always “close enough”.

I hated that thing. Our chem professor didn’t trust them newfangled calculators. Every desk in our 100 person classroom was covered with penciled calculations.

I think the K&E log log duplex trig slide rule I won in a math competition when a senior in high school is up in the attic somewhere. As an undergraduate physics major (1965-69) I used it very little. There were big electromechanical calculators available for heavy work, and by senior year I had access to a Friedan electronic calculator (a couple of feet deep, little CRT screen with a stack of four operands, decimal point adjusted with a click wheel). In grad school the research group had a small desktop 4-function plus square root nixie tube display thing, replaced within a year or two by HP35, and then HP45, RPN handhelds.

Sadly my K&E Log-Log Duplex Decitrig got wet in a flood and was ruined. Discovered it when I felt nostalgic and pulled it out of storage. That saved me from having to admit I could not do everything it was capable of doing.

When the apocalypse comes, there is no power grid and all the batteries are dead, those old slide rules will come in handy for those of us who know how to use them.

this time we will let the rules slide. but if this ever happens again…!

I still have my old slide rule (from my High School years), not in a closet but at the back of a desk drawer. Teddy bears, which I used to buy as gifts for Mom, abound all through the apartment….

I had a fairly simple bamboo slide rule through high school, and a slightly more complicated one starting university. (I seem to recall that various chemistry calculations involved log-log scales.) I also picked up a small circular one.

When I was in grad school, the local Student Store found a box in the attic and sold the contents—$1 for a 6" slide rule and $2 for a big one. I got a small simple one, and a Pickett log-log duplex with the traditional nerd leather belt case. The latter has so many scales that I have no idea how to use.