fstopmike
Project Flickr - Digital Revolution
The Digital Revolution has made my slide rule a relic. How quickly the change came about. I bought this slide rule in 1967 when I entered Georgia Tech as a freshman. All of the engineering majors needed to have one. I also joined a fraternity and partied hard. Everything you saw on Animal House happened in my fraternity long before the movie was ever made, including the Harley being driven through the house during a party. My fraternity has been thrown off campus two times that I know of. Long story made short, I flunked out and went into the Army.
I returned in 1972. The slide rule was still in use, but one guy in my Physics lab had a calculator. It cost about $400, a boatload of money in '72. I quit in '73 to work in the family hardware store.
I returned to Tech in '75. Nobody had a slide rule anymore. Everybody had calculators. I bought a Hewlett Packard model HP-25. It cost $175. By comparison, my tuition was $125. There were basically two calculator choices, either an HP, or a Texas Instruments. The HP used RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), which I loved. RPN requires you to enter the numbers in a stack and then perform the calculations. If you wanted to multiply 2 X 3, you would enter 2, then 3, then hit the multiply sign. If you wanted to multiply 2x3 and divide by 6x5, you would enter 2, then 3, hit multiply, then enter 6, then 5, then hit multiply, and then divide. It took a little getting used to, but you wouldn't have to enter brackets for the two multiplication operations.
I might have set a college career record by being a tenth quarter sophomore. EE3250 turned out to be my death knell. Non Linear Systems in Communication and Control. The course was all abstract, all variables, it didn't have the first number in it. My second child was on the way, my math was now close to 10 years old, and the calculator was no help, so my talents were used in the hardware field rather than as an Electrical Engineer or a Physicist.
Project Flickr - Digital Revolution
The Digital Revolution has made my slide rule a relic. How quickly the change came about. I bought this slide rule in 1967 when I entered Georgia Tech as a freshman. All of the engineering majors needed to have one. I also joined a fraternity and partied hard. Everything you saw on Animal House happened in my fraternity long before the movie was ever made, including the Harley being driven through the house during a party. My fraternity has been thrown off campus two times that I know of. Long story made short, I flunked out and went into the Army.
I returned in 1972. The slide rule was still in use, but one guy in my Physics lab had a calculator. It cost about $400, a boatload of money in '72. I quit in '73 to work in the family hardware store.
I returned to Tech in '75. Nobody had a slide rule anymore. Everybody had calculators. I bought a Hewlett Packard model HP-25. It cost $175. By comparison, my tuition was $125. There were basically two calculator choices, either an HP, or a Texas Instruments. The HP used RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), which I loved. RPN requires you to enter the numbers in a stack and then perform the calculations. If you wanted to multiply 2 X 3, you would enter 2, then 3, then hit the multiply sign. If you wanted to multiply 2x3 and divide by 6x5, you would enter 2, then 3, hit multiply, then enter 6, then 5, then hit multiply, and then divide. It took a little getting used to, but you wouldn't have to enter brackets for the two multiplication operations.
I might have set a college career record by being a tenth quarter sophomore. EE3250 turned out to be my death knell. Non Linear Systems in Communication and Control. The course was all abstract, all variables, it didn't have the first number in it. My second child was on the way, my math was now close to 10 years old, and the calculator was no help, so my talents were used in the hardware field rather than as an Electrical Engineer or a Physicist.