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I started high school with a slide rule and finished with an HP-45 calculator. I didn't think it could get much better. 
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I went through all school including high school equivalent with a book of log tables! No fancy slide-rule technology for me - never mind a calculator!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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With a slide rule, anything after the third significant digit had to be figured out in your head, so log and trig tables were still needed if the answer had to be accurate.
The HP-45 was still high-end at the time. The HP-65 (programmable) had just come out that year.
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Me too!
Started Uni with a double-scale slide rule, finished with some weird 12 digit calculator which only had a 6 digit display!. Went all the way through school (until my last year) using my father's old 7 figure log tables. Still got them: showed them to a class of 14 year old IT students recently - they'd never even heard of them!
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I found one of my old slide rules a few months ago.
I couldn't remember how to use it 
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Here's a refresher[^]. 
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Woo-Hoo!
Downloaded!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Blimey, I have an almost exact 'clone' of that rule made by Faber Castell - it's the one I used through 6th Form and most of Uni...
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That is a lot of reading. Where is the 30 second YouTube video? 
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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I had a circular slide rule - fitted neatly in the inside pocket and was easier to use than a linear 6" rule.
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I saw those in the uni shop and was tempted, but I was on student money and had to pinch pennies.
But when you can buy a boxload without feeling it, you don't need them any more 
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I've got an old ROUND slide rule my father used when he was an engineer at Bendix!
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My brother-in-law - about ten years older than me - used to tell people that he was incapable of summing the grocery bill without having his slide rule available.
That joke was surprisingly successful for quite a few years, especially with those my age and younger, who knew well what slide rules were, but never used them seriously, so we didn't know their application area, mathematically speaking.
People his own age, who knew slide rules well, found the joke silly. Young people of today have no clue about what a slide rule is, so they never get the joke. But for ten, maybe twenty years, half of the audience would laugh and the other half would wonder: What's so funny?
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That's definitely an "in" joke. Even when slide rules were used, not that many people had to use them. Maybe he used it as a litmus test to see who got it.
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The point being that slide rules were not used for addition/subtraction - only for multiplication/division, power/root, exponential/log, and trigonometry.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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High school was Sept 1980- June 1984
Chemistry in 1983 even though we had calculators the chemistry teachers required us to use slide rules. I got to use my Dad's, he was an electrical engineer, had to be VERY careful with it.
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High school was Sept 1970 to June 1974. Chemistry was also where the slide rule or calculator got used the most. But slide rules weren't mandated and very few students used one. The HP-45 came out in 1973.
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Old style UK 'O' Levels - we had log tables.
'A' Level Chemistry - allowed to upgrade to slide rules.
Log tables are easier and more accurate.
Was given a calculator (TI-57 Programmable) for my 18th birthday.
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In what country were slide rules still used in schools in 1980-84?
I still remember in 1980 my maths teacher complaining that youngsters didn't know how to use slide rules any more. Us youngsters, with our spiffy new TI25 scientific calculators, were "meh!".
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It could! Some of us used Texas TI-51. So there, HP-freak  ...
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Same for me, only I ended up with a RPN[^] calculator, the Omron 12SR[^]
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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HP calculators were (are?) also RPN.
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Now that you mention it, at the time when I had that Omron (around 1980), there was one HP model around that at least one of the other students used. But most were using TI caluclators with direct input and brackets. I believe RPN was all but forgotten by the time I went to university (1984). That's when I got my first programmable pocket calculator, with a whopping 10 KB memory (quite a lot when you take into consideration this was still the high time of the 8 bit home computers)
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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It didn't take long to get used to RPN, and then I hated other calculators. What's with these stupid parentheses buttons?!
And the first time I saw a parser and stack for interpreting arithmetic expressions in Comp Sci class, it was like deja vu.
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