(j3.2006) Retro cool to go with your Fortran compiler

[Miles Ellis]

I think I may have had a slide rule once - I certainly remember using  
one.  But I have to admit I always preferred my trusty book of log  
tables (and all the other useful things therein).  Perhaps that was  
because I was always a mathematician and not an engineer (;-) and a  
slide rule was never particularly accurate, being only, as Jerry  
points out, accurate to 2-3 significant figures.

Which reminds me of the comment made by one of my lecturers at  
Cambridge who had a habit of dismissing what we had been taught the  
previous year as 'good enough for engineers' but not, of course, for  
mathematicians.

But I do also remember using a wonderful Bruns Viga calculating  
machine when I first started work to check the results produced by my  
computer programs.  It was a company requirement in those early days!

Miles

-----------
On 15 Dec 2010, at 12:58, Jerry Wagener wrote:

> I too still have my slide rule, a Pickett purchased in 1955,  
> complete with leather case and belt loop  (old-timers will remember  
> the brand, and I see that the thinkgeek reference includes a link to  
> the Pickett slide rule manual). In addition to the usual dual-base  
> log log scales it has square roots, cube roots, sine, tangent (and  
> of course arc sine and arc tangent), and several more scales. A  
> precision instrument (mechanically) but, alas, one can compute with  
> it to only about two significant figures (in some cases you can  
> interpolate close to three significant figures) - guess that was  
> good enough for much early engineering work.
>
>    -Jerry
>
> On Dec 15, 2010, at 4:42 AM, Lawrie Schonfelder wrote:
>
>> I still have my 1950s slide rule. It was much used when I was an  
>> undergrad but then I found first a
>> marchant desk calculator and then a computer called CIRAC (32  
>> instructions, 16 16bit Williams tube
>> registers, 1024 16bit word mercury delay line memory, 2millisecond  
>> cycle time) and the slide rule
>> passed into the back of the cupboard. I actually solved a PDE on  
>> the computer before moving on to a
>> IBM 1620 with Fortran. Nostalgia!
>>
>> --
>> Lawrie Schonfelder
>> Wirral, UK
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org [mailto:j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org]On
>>> Behalf Of Van Snyder
>>> Sent: 14 December 2010 23:54
>>> Subject: (j3.2006) Retro cool to go with your Fortran compiler
>>>
>>>
>>> Retro cool to go with your Fortran compiler.
>>>
>>> http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/be12/
>>>
>>>
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