I still have the sliderule that my chemistry teacher in HS forced us to buy in 1976! Even though many of us had calculators, and they were coming down in price a lot by then, he wanted us to learn how to use it in case we didn’t have a calculator, or the battery died.
The only thing that I use it for now is as a straight edge, or a ruler. It ought to be in a museum, next to an abacus.
Many of my Intro Chemistry students today make numerous calculator errors on exams, particularly problems involving scientific notation. When all you have is a slide rule, you need to know the basic rules involving manipulation of exponents. Sometimes I am thankful for having to struggle with a slide rule, during my early college years.
The only thing that I use it for now is as a straight edge, or a ruler. It ought to be in a museum, next to an abacus.
I have my old (circa 1958) sly drool. I paid $20 for it; the best model cost $30 and I didn’t know the difference between the two at the time or I would have sprung for the extra $10. The better model had a more accurate square root function, for one thing, but the physical characteristics were also better. It would have been worth it - but when I asked the clerk about the value of the more expensive model, he didn’t know as much about slide rules as I did.I agree that it is useful only as a straight edge - but mostly, it’s a memento. I took a review course decades later, and systematically borrowed a company HP-35 calculator to do the homework. One day I needed to do homework for the class, but I forgot to borrow the calculator and so I fell back on the old slide rule. Or tried to; I found I just didn’t have the patience to keep track of the decimal point, and after a couple of tries I just allowed the homework to slide. It was that frustrating.
I don’t have occasion to do sophisticated calculations any more, but I love the idea that with a good spreadsheet my computer can crunch whatever numbers you got.
Your HS chemistry teacher was hyper conservative in teaching what he knew and had always taught; the writing was on the wall by then.