Posted on 08/31/2004 10:04:24 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
"The quintessential moment for me is the story where the boy fasts all day so he can lose enough weight to smuggle his scouting uniform on to a ship. When the ship gets a hole in mid-planetary-flight, he plugs it up with the uniform and saves everyone from explosive decompression LOL!"
That is either "FARMER IN THE SKY," or "CITIZEN OF THE UNIVERSE"
The Heinlein juveniles, mostly serialized in "Boy's Life" magazine, are some of my favorites!
The ones I loved were the circular</i) slide rules -- very easy to operate and in the hands of a skilled operator, faster than a calculator, believe it or not.
One of the better aspects of the slide rule is that it was imprecise. When I see someone with a computer or calculator telling me that something needs to measure 6.4993756 inches, I have to laugh.
Seems like every math classroom had a giant sliderule hanging over the blackboard. You might think the giant sliderule was more accurate than the footlong variety, but that wasn't the case.
I had a Picket yellow aluminum trig rule in high school. Some dork stole just the center slide, making it useless even as a memento.
My kids couldn't believe the scene in Appollo 13 where a NASA guy pulls out his slide rule in a moment of crisis.
Wow! Haven't even THOUGHT about a Magic-Brain for years...
The Magic Brain worked, but it was low end. The Addiator was a better adding machine.
Don't get me wrong. I recall using a slide rule most of the way through high school.
50? :-)
The K&E I have on this desk is all plastic and is not accurate anymore due to the plastic shrinking more on the right than on the left. The old circular one was an aluminum disk and would have retained its dimensions. How do the bamboo core ones do for aging?
Except you don't use a slide rule for addition. :-)
My bamboo one is still in perfect shape. :-)
I still have a complete "Minivac 6020" with box. :-)
They had us learn how to use a slide rule at the end of 8th grade. By the next fall, calculators started coming out. I think we were the last ones to learn that at our school.
Note, that is an upscaled minivac 601
Didn't notice that, but I try my best to put my mind to sleep during Hollywood movies.
But while on the subject of fantasy, I'd like to recommend a series that will be made into movies and needs to be read before it is ruined. It is the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. A very literate "sequel" to Paradise Lost. I find it to be much more adult than Harry Potter and a lot more interesting than Lord of the Rings.
She told me that she had given all her slide rules to the slide rule museum.
I guess there really is such a place.
I show it to kids whose computing knowledge does not extend beyond Microsoft and ask them if they can tell me what it is.
1 [I served several years as a JA Advisor, but never in Cambodia]
2I used to be able to read Hollerith from the punches alone, but that was MANY moons ago.
I'm also extremely adept at solving the Jumble puzzle in the paper VERY quickly; I think the two are related.
First, PH, are you sure about the early 70's being the death of the slide rule? They were still common, if not in preponderance, in freshman physics in '73.
Second:
Then, in the early 1970s Hewlett Packard came out with the first commercial calculator, the HP-35, signaling an end to the slide rule’s dominance in scientific computing.
Is this accurate? I have this haunting feeling that Sinclair was first (or maybe they were just much cheaper.)
Side story: as the cost of calculators dropped, and new ones whith far more functionality began to replace the older, clunker versions, the old Sinclairs were worth virtually nothing by the late 70's. They were favorites used by upper classman who had nothing better to do than torment the freshmen in a physics final exam by sneaking into the lecture hall with about 250 freshmen, and about 20 minutes into the exam, the faux student would pull out his worn out, burned out Sinclair, and pretend he couldn't get it to work.
The imposter, feigning ever-increasing frustration, caught the attention of students around him who began to notice a building sense of anger, where upon the guy would finally start screaming: "OH, SHIT; NOW THE BATTERIES ARE DEAD! TO HELL WITH ENGINEERING -- I'M GOING TO SWITCH TO BEING A MUSIC MAJOR!" and with that he'd storm down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall, with all the wide-eyed freshmen staring at him, at which point the faux student would let out one final "ARRRGGGGHHHHHH!" as he hurled the Sinclair with furious force angainst the chalk board, shattering it into a shower of plastic shards, and stormed out of the room.
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