Don Foreman wrote:
On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:32:01 -0500, Wes wrote:

cavelamb wrote:

And, he didn't have AutoCAD or Alibre to do his designs VBG

Karl




Neither did NASA when we went to the moon.


I wonder how much sooner we would have got there if the engineers had a scientific
calculator instead of those books of logarithms?

Wes
That capability was available if needed. There were Frieden
calculators, Kurta calculators, and FORTRAN became commercially
available in 1957.


I beg to argue, Don.

Even through the late 1960s, the term "computer" referred to a
woman who operated an "adding machine". Even at NASA.

And - even I had a handy dandy slide rule. Mine is a Decilon
8 inch. I still have it and can still do (simple!) manipulations
on it.

But FORTRAN, while in the universities before late 60s, was not
widely used until much later. NASA was mainly doing "machine"
(not even Assembly!).

Heck, I know a guy who almost invented time sharing Visicalc -
but his boss though real computer time was to valuable for any
such silliness!


At least that's the way I remember it...


--

Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb/