Virtual Slide rules

Very cool! Copied to 'favourites'. Thanks.

It's a shame that they don't teach slide rules anymore - or have slide rule clubs like I was in, in high school. It's a great way to learn the value of simple solutions to complex problems.

Yes, the old log log deci trig that I used is gone forever...but they sell well on ebay...

I missed out on slide rules.

Back in high school, the seniors were always carrying their "sticks" around and using them for even mundane calculations. When we became juniors, I asked my dad for his slide rule, which he had for about 15 years or so. Unfortunately (or not), the school decided that slide rules were obsolete and struck it off the curriculum when we became seniors. Calculators became the tool of choice.

back pocket? In a class full of engineers? They would grab it right quick. In addition, you would bend it when you sat down.

A lot of guys had leather cases on their belts....they were envied.

I kept mine in a briefcase. The back pack craze had not yet started in 1958...

Mine was also in my briefcase, I still miss it......I had two 6" versions and one 12" version....for extra accuracy!!

Mine were all hardwood with a bonded plastic overlay, we were quite jealous later of the "All plastic" versions, I have no idea why now......

I had a professor who taught Power Systems engineering, and he carried a slide rule with him until the mid-eighties.

Nothing made him more irate than for students to put too many decimal places of accuracy in their answers. (When you use the square root of 3, you get lots of decimal places showing up on your calculator, for example . . . )

He regularly told people that he would mark their answers wrong if they had more precision than his slide rule, and he made good on his statement!

He finally broke down when he bought an Hewlett Packard calculator which allowed him to choose the limit on the number of decimal places it would display. Plus, it used reverse Polish notation, which he liked.

Ahhh . . . the good ol' days. It's a shame that they were soooo long ago.

Nice Blog, thanks.

Yeah, this is cool!

A couple of us here in the office were just discussing SR's the other day and someone mentioned they would like to get one.

So, I sent them all a couple of 'em.

Now we have no excuse that our computers are down!!!

I had need to find a log (or inverse log) function the other day. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find a scientific calculator around the house. BUT I remembered a slide rule in some of my stuff in the garage. PROBLEM SOLVED!! Plus I believe I am the only one around who knows how to use it, so it won't wander off.

Bill