I knew what you meant.
By 1976 or so, it seemed like everyone had calculators, true. For a while you’d see plenty of slide rules in thrift stores, but not recently. My old slide rule is in a junk drawer in the spare desk rather than on the wall.
We had a VT grad working for a while at the Arizona copper mine I retired from. Don’t know if he’s still with the company.
Well truth in advertising I’m from WV. In order to be allowed back in the will and not have to eat at the ‘little kids table’ at family gatherings I had to “fix” my VaTech mistake. So I went to grad school at WVU (worked part-time at first!). I also switched to EE\Math. Got an MS in that eventually, and then went to work for a while. My family went to WVU since the beginning of time. As I stated above I was a pariah for not doing my undergrad there. (Seriously I was! My uncles were pissed at me!) Another thing driving going to grad school, it was the late 1970s, oil prices were crashing as were geoscience jobs. I already survived one layoff, I wasn’t going to chance another particularly while I was still a free man. Later I returned there for a PhD.