On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:44:58 GMT, "Ivan Vegvary"
wrote:

How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm talking
about.

Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95, Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar
modern day PCs and CAD programs.

I stayed with a given technology much longer. Slide rule thru jr year
college, then 4-banger calculator, SR30 (I think), Altair 8800b ($995
32K board with on-board BASIC, twas the department's not mine),
Commodore 64 (thru 2nd round of grad school and into university
teaching), IBM PS/2, Zeos 386SX w/20MB HDD and Hercules graphics card,
then 486 33MHz, then pentium, pentium II, etc.

I think the slide rule should still be taught. It sure gave use the ability
to estimate the order of magnitude of the answer. Ask a kid today what 100
times 100 is. No clue. Something that's lost today.

You ain't kidding. Trying to explain ratios to one of our future
nurses. Asked her "what's larger, 10000/3 or 3/4?" No clue. She
guessed wrong.

The good news is that we still have some good students out there who
understand numbers. They are our future.

Terry