Sliderules, Logs, and Prodigies

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:30 AM 11/1/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:

>Sliderules were just becoming common when I was in high school....
>
>Seriously, only a very few of us had and used sliderules...mine was a big
>synthetic K & E (Keuffel and Esser, as I recall). The raging "DOS vs. Mac"
>or "RISC vs. CISC" debate of that age was "aluminum" (the yellow Dietzgens)
>vs. the old standby, "bamboo." Plus some oddball circular sliderules.

Slide rules are still, IMHO, the best calculator to keep in a car for
calculating gas mileage.  They are rugged, have no batteries, are not
attractive to thieves, and have sufficient accuracy for the problem.  They
also teach the logarithm relation, which is valuable for understanding the
physical universe.


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