Geek Moment

[uneasy]

I was looking through a box for my paper punch, and came across my old slide rule. It's funny because I was just thinking about it last week, and here it is. I didn't think I had it any more.

No, I'm not that old. I saw it in a Salvation Army store for $2 when I was a kid and got it. Strange kid. I learned how to use it, and used it for some things in school. It's a very clever tool, and no batteries required.

The best thing about it is that users have to keep the power in their heads. It only gives you an answer like 5.4 and you have to keep track if it means 540 or 0.054. So you have to follow what you are doing in your head instead of just punching buttons mindlessly.

Anyone ever use one? What geeky things do you have in your attic?

 

[Jim_MDP]

Don't know how to use one, never had one, always wanted one. Have no use for it, don't expect I ever will.

Has to be, hands down, one of the most incredible mechanical inventions of the human mind.

Glad you found yours.

Remember my Norden avatar? A '40s era wholly non-electronic integrating calculator. Very cool tech as well.

 

[Zep]

Yes, I did use a slide-rule at school - was given lessons on it, what's more! The late 1960's... I STILL have mine, although it is not in great shape, being a plastic Staedtler model.

In our computer museum we have MANY of these wonderful devices - a whole display of them, in fact.

For the slide-rule, the prototype calculator, we should thank Messrs Newton and Napier, and their co-star logarithms.

 

[Yahweh]

Geek moments...

Well, in my math class, there is a big box of scientific calculators. Not just any scientific calculators, TI-83+ calculators. I taught myself how to program them (I already knew Visual Basic so it wasnt hard at all), I made spiffy little applications (until some idiot got ahold of my calculator and purged the memory)...

I've also competed in Photoshop competitions (havent we all...).

I have a binder in my room filled with all sorts of scientifical things. Its the same style and design from those people who give you the National Geographic animal cards that fold out revealing all sorts of facts.

I've competed in website designing competitions and WON!


Ah, nerd memories...

 

[Zep]

Yahweh, "geek" came long before that stage, I'm afraid. You needed to have programmed one of these, in DOS BASIC only, to qualify:

 

[xouper]

Zep: Yahweh, "geek" came long before that stage, I'm afraid. You needed to have programmed one of these, in DOS BASIC only, to qualify:

Done that, been there, on this: ('cept it was Cassette BASIC, no disk.)

Image courtesy of http://www.pc-history.org/


And yes, I've used a slide rule in school.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Used slide rule professionally for many years. For calculations in electronic circuitry, they are really unsurpassed: You only mostly need three digits and once you have found, say the ideal resistance value, you can visually see the nearest standard value, move the slide to that, and see what current you'll really get. And the habit of keeping the power in my head will never leave me--- unlike some younger engineers, whom I have caught with results in nine decimals, .... and three powers off .

Hans

 

[fishbob]

I still have my old slide rule, with the leather case and the belt loop attachment. Way Cool.

 

[athon]

What are we young(er) ones going to be telling our grandchildren?

"My first computer was an Apple 2E. I didn't get my first decent computer until I was fifteen."

*kid yawns, turns back to photo-realistic, tactile-enhanced, nano-tech Doom 15 computer game*

Athon

 

[Mr. Skinny]

I have my old K&E slide rule in a shadow box labeled "In case of power failure - break glass"

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I have, sitting here on my table, an object that is 12" x 13" x 3". It weighs about 14 pounds. It is a capacitance-coupled microstore for a Digital Scientific Corporation META-4 user-microprogrammable computer, circa 1970.

It contains 1K of 16-bit words stored on 16 plastic cards, each 7.75" square. A bit is represented by the presence or absence of a small copper chip. We programmed the cards by removing copper chips with an X-acto knife, or gluing them back on when we made a mistake.

We had two of these machines at Brown University. One was microprogrammed as a general-purpose computer, the other as a general-purpose computer with graphics extensions. The second one had instructions to interface to a home-made 4-processor graphics processing unit, a precursor to today's graphics cards. The graphics processing unit, dubbed the SIMALE, was housed in a smoked glass cube about 24" on a side.

The operating system for this beast was named BOGUS: Brown Operating Graphics University System. We programmed it using two modified versions of U. of Waterloo's Assembler G for the IBM S/360.

~~ Paul

 

[Zep]

Some of the first machines I learned to program on in MACRO in the 1970's looked a lot like this:

<img src=http://www.acms.org.au/album/h90013.jpg>

 

[Michael Redman]

"Press play on tape 1."

Thanks Zep and Xouper for bringing back some childhood memories.

I love the scene in Apollo 13 where all the engineers whip out the slide rules to check the astronaut's pencil and paper calculations. We went to the moon using that technology.

 

[uneasy]

In case people don't know what I'm talking about, here it is. A beauty. A good solid metal one.

 

[Cecil]

Yahweh, "geek" came long before that stage, I'm afraid. You needed to have programmed one of these, in DOS BASIC only, to qualify:

Does an Apple ][e count?

I remember the first Tic-Tac-Toe game I wrote in BASIC. I had to retype half the code partway through because I didn't space the line numbers out at the beginning.

 

[uneasy]

My cousin had a Heathkit (those old Zenith computers you could build yourself to save some money). Load one thing on the cassette drive, like basic, and that was that. I sat looking over his shoulder asking him so so many questions, he got fed up and left. Then I got on it for hours.

 

[jayrev]

I learned to program on one of these. It was a real piece of crap.

http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html

I have this conversation quite often with the geezers, (ahem) I mean more experienced programmers at the office. It usually goes something like this:

Programmer 1: When I started programming we used punch cards.

Programmer 2: When I started programming there were no higher level languages. Everything was assembly code.

Programmer 3: Oh yeah? When I started programming we wrote directly in binary...zeros and ones.

Programmer 4: You had ones? We would have killed for ones!

 

[uneasy]

I learned to program on one of these. It was a real piece of crap.

http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html

What a piece of junk. A friend of mine had one of those. I felt sorry for him because I could tell it wasn't good for much. I remember trying to push the keypad real hard and the screen blinking every time something happened. He actually used it to do some business calculations.

A good calculator could do the work of the Sinclair. HP41C anyone?

 

[roger]

HP41C - it's the calculator I am still using everyday, and I bought it back when it first came out. It's been dropped down a stairwell, and otherwise suffered abuse, and it is still working perfectly.

I also had one of those timex sinclair computers, and a TI-94A or whatever it was. I learned programming on a computer about the size of an office desk that hosted BASIC, with something like a whopping 8K of RAM. Good Ed how I loved that machine! It belonged to my high school, and I used to stay after school just to have access to that beast.

edited to add: apparently my memory is faulty - I have the HP41CV, and it had already been out a few years when I bought it - 1983 or so.

 

[Brown]

I bought a slide rule at my local school supply store because I believed slide rules were about to become relics. I was right. Shortly thereafter, no further slide rules were sold from that store. (I eventually bought a TI-30 calculator from the same store.)