On 3/31/2010 9:48 PM, Martin H. Eastburn wrote:
In 1970 I bought with a loan app - a $600 calculator from a business supply
company. It was a 12 digit Nixie tube four-banger with memory. It saved
the beloved and I when doing grades. A few more years later I had a machine
language computer.

I did logs on that 4 banger - trig sin and cos and tan. There were some
very creative guys learning tricks and approximations and small formulas
that one could get good numbers.

The company was Cannon. I scrapped out the machine in about 1995 or so.
It had a bad supply - HV likely leaky and the controller wasn't up to
speed.

Several years after the first TI and HP came on the scene - and we both
died. $150 for a full blown ? - I think we still owned about that much
on the Nixie box. TI's SR-50 ... Been a TI and HP guy since.
Went to HP in 85 and back to TI in 2008.

I had a small circular slide rule, Dad had a tubular slide rule.
We both still have slide rules in our desks and use them.
Faster than getting out the banger and entering the number.

Long calc's or complex ones bring out the box - one or the other.

Just a comment but I picked up a piece of software a while back called
"The Mathematical Explorer" for about a hundred bucks. Turned out to be
the Mathematica 6 core with a couple of features turned off and without
some of the add-on packages. They've discontinued that now and have a
full-featured version sold for non-commercial use for 400 bucks or so.
If you happen to find the older one though for the low price it's well
worth getting if you ever have to do any kind of serious computation.


Martin

Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 3/30/2010 8:37 PM, Swingman wrote:
On 3/30/2010 6:53 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:

My favorite slide rule was the circular slide rule. For some spectra
conversion in IR or UV you could make the calculation on the circular
slide rule faster that any calculator today.

Do you remember your first electronic calculator? I got a TI-30 (IIRC)
when I went back to school briefly after the service. We weren't even
allowed to bring them to class, much less take a test with it.

TI-30? That is only about 20 years old. The electronic calculator I am
talking about was bought in 1970. It had a big nixy(sp?) display and
was the size of a typewriter. It was significantly better that the old
mechanical one. It did X / + - and had 12 rows of 10 keys in each row.
Took several seconds to do simply + and - calculations and longer to
do X and /.