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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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Does anyone remember the Forth programming language? (The top leader even presribed it, and the operations: Go Forth, and multipy.) It was stack based: You pushed two numbers on the stack, executed a multiply, and the two top stack entries were replaced by their product.
I was working for a company that developed (a few) commercial applications in Forth. The guys in that team were incapable of using TI calculators, they were dependent on HP models.
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I had to learn both systems since I helped my friends with math, and they all used TIs. 
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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I still have my bright yellow Picket slide rule, crappy plastic, of course. I also have my dad's fancy wooden rule from 1950.
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What? Microsoft? I think I was in third grade when they started up.
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FWIW, the calc.exe version included in Windows 10 Insider builds has included a graphing calculator for a while now.
I have no idea how it compares. Just thought I'd point it out.
[Edit]
Apple Store or Google Play only. Not in the MS store, which means no Windows version.
We officially live in a different world.
[Edit]
Ok, I had only paid attention to the image with the graph, and I totally missed the rest of it. A solver seems a lot more interesting...
modified 1-Apr-20 15:35pm.
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I have a love for my TI-Nspire, but I like the guidance these types of calculators give. I recall a similar product by Wolfram being quite handy.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: With this had existed in school
On the contrary, I'm happy this did not exist in school. Would have made us more dumb, don't you feel so?
Yes, it would have reduced our effort in solving problems, but would not have developed our thinking faculties, and also problem solving abilities, isn't it?
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You're quite right.
Let me rephrase: I would have wished this had existed when I were in school.
Because like everyone else (well, mostly) I'm a lazy bastard. But yes, it would have made made me more stupid, like the kids today.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: Well, in those times mobile phones had antennas.
In those times they were called 'Walkie Talkie'[^].
I liked that name - in fact I find it would fit mobiles today even better 
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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If you are helping your children with math you have not seen in 20+ years, I found Alpha Wolfram (free edition) incredibly helpful.
On some problems, the free version would not show all of the intermediate steps, but you could at least find the correct answer.
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Nah, solving the equation yourself is actually the fun of math.
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