Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for November 09, 2022

I got my first slide rule when I was 12

I never used a slide rule, being only 54. I had to look up how they worked!

I still have my Otis King’s Pocket Calculator: a cylindrical slide rule that was graduated to THREE SIGNIFICANT FIGURES!!!!!

Still got my guessing stick from the late 60s. Never could keep track of the decimal point though.

Slide Rule: “Always go down feet first”.

My slide rule is on my desk; not I admit, that I use it for anything but nostalgia now.

My daughter found my slide rule in the desk. "What’s this? I said. “Ask your teacher.” Teacher didn’t know.

My husband, 67, took the AP Chemistry exam in 74. They had been told that they would be allowed to use a calculator on their final exam. But students elsewhere shared answers on their calculators and so the day before the exam they learned that calculators were banned. So they all had to go back to using the slip stick instead.

My dad loved his slide rule. I have no clue how to use one.

Have mine and my dad’s. During the ‘60s, on all those NASA flights, the controllers used slide rules, no such thing as personal workstations. NASA had to borrow the Weather Service’s or the Pentagon’s mainframes for calculations of lunar orbits; NASA didn’t have their own.

I needed a slide rule for university. Scientific calculators were extremely expensive then, yet the profs wanted us to actually use our brain, not rely on technology to do it for us. A slide rule is really not that difficult to master.

The primary virtue of a slide ruler is you had to know about what the answer would be. I’ve seen people put numbers into a calculator, make a mistake and get an answer that was off by a factor of a thousand or more, but they’d assume it was correct.

Grampa sent you a treasure trove, Dipstick!

I will always remember a type of circular slide rule called a Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer. It was used by Dr. Strangelove in the StanleyKubrick movie

As a kid, I was amazed that the slide rule’s lines could be laid out so that they always gave the right answer…

Saw a baby’s teething toy many years ago. Hollow, soft plastic molded in the shape of a slide rule. They called it a “Sly Drool”. Pretty cute at the time.

Slide rulers are still useful. You can use one to push the buttons on a calculator.

I used a slide rule in high school (this was a few years before portable calculators were common), but I always had to do the calculation again on paper anyway to place the decimal point.

He sent you some of his happy memories and symbols of his life.

A slide rule is better than an Abacus, but not as fast.

By the time I got to junior high and high school, slide rules were passe. A few years ago, I bought one at a yard sale, just because I liked it, along with a book on how to use it. Learning how to use it is on my list of things to do when I retire.

I bought my Dad a cheap abacus as a joke present, knowing that the “translated” instructions would be unintelligible. We got a lot of amusement offering guests the abacus and instructions and asked them to help us understand how to use it. We got quite a few mathematicians and English majors flummoxed by those “instructions!”