Still have a yellow plastic slide rule with a leather case; never really learned to use it and hesitant to let it go in case I ever need to. Even before the slide rule we had a couple of abacuses (abacusi?) around the house; they were only used as musical instruments.
I can multiply and sort of divide on a slide rule; the slide rules I have have about six other things on them that aren’t multiplication and division that I don’t even know what they are, let alone how to use them.
I’ve got two abacuses, also; as far as I can tell, they don’t actually help you add and subtract; they just keep track of it as you are doing it in your head. You’re still doing the addition and subtraction yourself; they’re just reminding you when you’ve carried the one or whatever.
@ianosmond, the slide rule makes the math mechanical (after enough practice), which makes it faster and lets you do numbers too large to hold in your head.
Just dug out my old slide rule at work last week – showing one of the “youngsters” how we used to do it “in the day.”
An uncle who had been an engineer passed along to me as a budding nerd two slide rules he owned and actually had used. One was compact, for convenient carrying, but had all the basic scales, and was clean and functional, with a slightly wobbly cursor. The big one had TWO slides, a bunch of different scales including inverses of most of the standard ones, logs on 10 and ln, and a magnifying view bubble on the cursor. Of course it didn’t actually help with homework, but my HS math teachers and my nerd pals in the math classes all were impressed when I brought them in.
yes, Foxtrot made me laugh. Chisenbop ho!
I have a slide rule that was handed down to me by my father. I’ve never really used it and could only ever do really basic functions with it. But after my calculator managed to turn itself on and drain the batteries right before a chemistry exam the first quarter of my freshman year, I started taking it with me to all exams as a backup/good luck charm. Occasionally a professor or TA would stop by my desk in the middle of the test and fiddle with it. Annoying, but usually not too distracting.
They were still teaching slide rule in high school while I was there. I had a plastic one for that purpose. When I went to college I got a simple calculator and that was that.
I’m not old enough for a slide rule, and happy enough that this is so. The venerable TI-30 became cheap enough for schoolchildren to own one right around the time that seemed like a good idea.
But, I do have a memory of running into one in a classroom once. Not one that was accidentally left by its owner, but the ginormous one that the teacher would have used to show students how to rule slides.
When I taught TCP/IP class, I forbid the use of calculators in class; students were allowed to use paper and pencil only to do the math. It turns out that, with one exception, all the math needed was learned by fifth grade and therefore retained by more adults. Converting from binary to digital uses multiplication by 0, 1, or 2, plus addition and subtraction. The only thing most students haven’t had since grade school is integer logarhythms to the base of 2, which sounds like scary math until I show off the secret. By the end of the class, most students can do everything in their heads without writing anything down.
logarhythms! I like the way that portmanteau ties math to music.
And yes, I too had and used my father’s old slide rule. It had a magnifying lens attached on a slide, which really helped.
I was going to comment that I liked the Clown Car Training one; then, I didn’t know why. So I went back to take another look and realized that the artist had endeavored to draw each baby’s sound in a unique font. (Then I looked to see if they were all different. eh.. maybe not, but maybe. One has the kind of Capital ‘A’ where the cross slants down to the right.)
When we were learning to use a slide rule in high school senior year math and I told my parents I needed one,dad handed me one he had (knowing him – it probably came home from WWII with him). It was an unusually small one. I had trouble using it as the space between numbers was too small and the number too hard to see.
Luckily in college I could do the math without it as calculators did not become common until some time later.
Logarhythms? Logarithms? Are we certain we are using these words correctly? Singing versus raising real numbers to real powers?
Logarythms? – Is that when one beats a tree stump for a drum? :-)
At one point I had a gadget that was a slide rule on the back and an adding machine (or something partway between an abacus and an adding machine; mechanical, but flat) on the front. Not sure what became of it.
“Logarhythms? Logarithms? Are we certain we are using these words correctly?”
Yes, it’s misspelled. Did you figure out what I meant?
At one point I had a device I can’t easily describe, but it was a little bit like a manual quasi-adding-machine, a little bit like an abacus, and nothing at all like a slide rule (all scales are linear, none log). It was fairly cheap, marketed to kids or naive adults on TV or in newspaper supplements, but still gave my parents pause in writing a check.
It was a tall rectangle, a metal case with maybe 5 numerical columns, each having a vertical slot and behind it an independent vertically sliding strip, with both layers having printed numbers and corresponding notches or holes. There were also wider holes at the top of the columns, thru which you see numbers printed on the sliders.
You entered numbers by putting a stylus point into a hole in the slider, and pulling it up or down as guided by the printed numbers. At the top and bottom of the slots for each column there were turnaround areas where you would encounter a notch from the next column and accomplish carrying a digit.
“At one point I had a device I can’t easily describe, but it was a little bit like a manual quasi-adding-machine, a little bit like an abacus, and nothing at all like a slide rule”
My Dad had one of these things: Ve-Po-Ad
I have it now, although I’d have to hunt for it. I came across it several years ago, and retaught myself how to use it.
I found mine. It wasn’t that hard after all. It is exactly like the one pictured, except the cover is black instead of maroon. I can put the cover into the configuration pictured, but it is not stable that way. I suspect they just propped it up for display. I don’t remember my Dad ever using it propped open like that.
Oh cool! Thanks, it’s very interesting to see that again.
The working area of the device in that picture is just as I recall. But I must have had a different model or brand, because mine was entirely handheld, and the one shown here has a tilt base to make it desktop usable.
Mitch: my gadget is more or less like that on the front; on the back, it’s a slide rule, and the whole thing is about the size of a wide-ish 6-inch ruler. I have a vague recollection that it had two banks of digits on the front, too, maybe with some kind of interconnect between them? Maybe I should look for it.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Still have a yellow plastic slide rule with a leather case; never really learned to use it and hesitant to let it go in case I ever need to. Even before the slide rule we had a couple of abacuses (abacusi?) around the house; they were only used as musical instruments.
I can multiply and sort of divide on a slide rule; the slide rules I have have about six other things on them that aren’t multiplication and division that I don’t even know what they are, let alone how to use them.
I’ve got two abacuses, also; as far as I can tell, they don’t actually help you add and subtract; they just keep track of it as you are doing it in your head. You’re still doing the addition and subtraction yourself; they’re just reminding you when you’ve carried the one or whatever.
@ianosmond, the slide rule makes the math mechanical (after enough practice), which makes it faster and lets you do numbers too large to hold in your head.
Just dug out my old slide rule at work last week – showing one of the “youngsters” how we used to do it “in the day.”
An uncle who had been an engineer passed along to me as a budding nerd two slide rules he owned and actually had used. One was compact, for convenient carrying, but had all the basic scales, and was clean and functional, with a slightly wobbly cursor. The big one had TWO slides, a bunch of different scales including inverses of most of the standard ones, logs on 10 and ln, and a magnifying view bubble on the cursor. Of course it didn’t actually help with homework, but my HS math teachers and my nerd pals in the math classes all were impressed when I brought them in.
yes, Foxtrot made me laugh. Chisenbop ho!
I have a slide rule that was handed down to me by my father. I’ve never really used it and could only ever do really basic functions with it. But after my calculator managed to turn itself on and drain the batteries right before a chemistry exam the first quarter of my freshman year, I started taking it with me to all exams as a backup/good luck charm. Occasionally a professor or TA would stop by my desk in the middle of the test and fiddle with it. Annoying, but usually not too distracting.
They were still teaching slide rule in high school while I was there. I had a plastic one for that purpose. When I went to college I got a simple calculator and that was that.
I’m not old enough for a slide rule, and happy enough that this is so. The venerable TI-30 became cheap enough for schoolchildren to own one right around the time that seemed like a good idea.
But, I do have a memory of running into one in a classroom once. Not one that was accidentally left by its owner, but the ginormous one that the teacher would have used to show students how to rule slides.
When I taught TCP/IP class, I forbid the use of calculators in class; students were allowed to use paper and pencil only to do the math. It turns out that, with one exception, all the math needed was learned by fifth grade and therefore retained by more adults. Converting from binary to digital uses multiplication by 0, 1, or 2, plus addition and subtraction. The only thing most students haven’t had since grade school is integer logarhythms to the base of 2, which sounds like scary math until I show off the secret. By the end of the class, most students can do everything in their heads without writing anything down.
logarhythms! I like the way that portmanteau ties math to music.
And yes, I too had and used my father’s old slide rule. It had a magnifying lens attached on a slide, which really helped.
I was going to comment that I liked the Clown Car Training one; then, I didn’t know why. So I went back to take another look and realized that the artist had endeavored to draw each baby’s sound in a unique font. (Then I looked to see if they were all different. eh.. maybe not, but maybe. One has the kind of Capital ‘A’ where the cross slants down to the right.)
When we were learning to use a slide rule in high school senior year math and I told my parents I needed one,dad handed me one he had (knowing him – it probably came home from WWII with him). It was an unusually small one. I had trouble using it as the space between numbers was too small and the number too hard to see.
Luckily in college I could do the math without it as calculators did not become common until some time later.
Logarhythms? Logarithms? Are we certain we are using these words correctly? Singing versus raising real numbers to real powers?
Logarythms? – Is that when one beats a tree stump for a drum? :-)
At one point I had a gadget that was a slide rule on the back and an adding machine (or something partway between an abacus and an adding machine; mechanical, but flat) on the front. Not sure what became of it.
“Logarhythms? Logarithms? Are we certain we are using these words correctly?”
Yes, it’s misspelled. Did you figure out what I meant?
At one point I had a device I can’t easily describe, but it was a little bit like a manual quasi-adding-machine, a little bit like an abacus, and nothing at all like a slide rule (all scales are linear, none log). It was fairly cheap, marketed to kids or naive adults on TV or in newspaper supplements, but still gave my parents pause in writing a check.
It was a tall rectangle, a metal case with maybe 5 numerical columns, each having a vertical slot and behind it an independent vertically sliding strip, with both layers having printed numbers and corresponding notches or holes. There were also wider holes at the top of the columns, thru which you see numbers printed on the sliders.
You entered numbers by putting a stylus point into a hole in the slider, and pulling it up or down as guided by the printed numbers. At the top and bottom of the slots for each column there were turnaround areas where you would encounter a notch from the next column and accomplish carrying a digit.
“At one point I had a device I can’t easily describe, but it was a little bit like a manual quasi-adding-machine, a little bit like an abacus, and nothing at all like a slide rule”
My Dad had one of these things: Ve-Po-Ad
I have it now, although I’d have to hunt for it. I came across it several years ago, and retaught myself how to use it.
I found mine. It wasn’t that hard after all. It is exactly like the one pictured, except the cover is black instead of maroon. I can put the cover into the configuration pictured, but it is not stable that way. I suspect they just propped it up for display. I don’t remember my Dad ever using it propped open like that.
Oh cool! Thanks, it’s very interesting to see that again.
The working area of the device in that picture is just as I recall. But I must have had a different model or brand, because mine was entirely handheld, and the one shown here has a tilt base to make it desktop usable.
Mitch: my gadget is more or less like that on the front; on the back, it’s a slide rule, and the whole thing is about the size of a wide-ish 6-inch ruler. I have a vague recollection that it had two banks of digits on the front, too, maybe with some kind of interconnect between them? Maybe I should look for it.