[PatrickHenry]

Robert Miles, a retired Purdue University civil engineering professor and a Purdue alumnus, left, and James Alleman, a current Purdue civil engineering professor, hold a 7-foot-long slide rule in front of an exhibit they created that contains about 200 of the pre-digital computational devices. The permanent exhibit is on display in the university’s Potter Engineering Center and includes slide rules from astronauts Neil Armstrong and Jerry Ross. (Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger)

[PatrickHenry]

Science list Ping! This is an elite subset of the Evolution list.
See the list's description in my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail me to be added or dropped.

[Flightdeck]

A little off-subject, but the fact that Bill Nelson got to ride in the shuttle pisses me off. He's just a dumb lawyer who only got the ride because he was a congressman, and now goes around acting like he was an astronaut who decided to run for public office.

[RightWhale]

Fast, accurate, good enough for engineering purposes, and right here on the desk--The K&E Deci-Lon

[2banana]

You know, you used to be real cool when you had strapped on your leather slide rule carrier to your belt...

[ProudVet77]

Those were the days.... :)
The hottest slide rule was made by Pickett. My family was on a limited budget so I had a plastic Sterling when IO was in high school.
The skill was in how you could do a series of operations without jotting down an intermediate result (equivalent to a memory in a calculator). We learned to do algebraic manipulations in our heads so we could do it all in one smooth seemless operation.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Slide rule bump.

[kevkrom]

Boiler bump!

[Fiddlstix]

I wish I still had my old "slip stick". I lost it during a move some years ago.

[Jonah Hex]

I amazed my 10-year old the first time I whipped out my slip-stick and came up with the correct multiplication answer before he could finish punching the numbers on his calculator.

Next week, I'll show him how we built the Pyramids....

[facedown]

I've still got mine. An A. W. Faber-Castell, made in Germany.

[megatherium]

I treasure my late grandfather's slide rule, a fine Keuffel and Esser with leather holster. He was a mining engineer, who worked in the dredging operations in the Panama Canal.

[billorites]

Among the few professionals who still use slide rules are pilots.

Although "electronic" E6-B's do much more than the circular slide rule version, I vividly remember getting embarrassed one cold January day when the electronic version failed on a check ride.

The slide rule works even when batteries fail.

[justiceseeker93]

I confess that I'm old enough to have been a sliderule guy
in college.

By way of curiosity, would anyone know when the last sliderule was manufactured?

[Theo]

Everyone in my high school physics class used a calculator on the final exam, except for me. Even though I had a nice TI calculator, I chose to use a sliderule. I earned the highest grade on the final.

True story. :-)

(Graduated from high school in 1984, FWIW....)

[Eepsy]

I have a serious soft spot for all the stories from the golden age of SF where the day is saved by an enterprising Boy Scout and his trusty slide rule. Especially the vintage Heinlein stuff. Always meant to get myself one of those slipsticks :D

[ravinson]

"Taking a course to learn how to use a slide rule was mandatory at one time," he said. "And from then on you used it for the rest of your academic career."

I recall my father teaching me how to use a slid rule when I was about 12. It certainly beat the hell out of the abacus.

[Ichneumon]

Seldom has an ubiquitous invention become so completely obsolete, so rapidly, as did the slide rule upon the advent of electronic calculators.

It seemed that one year, every "techie" had a slide rule, and then only 2-3 years later, they had virtually vanished and all manufacture of them ceased.

[Ichneumon]

Slide rules were for wimps, they made it too easy. Real geeks calculated on these:

.

...and programmed on these:

(and yes, I'm enough of an old fart to have owned and used both)

[Tallguy]

Another 'problem' introduced by electronic calculators was the issue of 'significant digits'. I got beat-up a lot by physics professors from the slide-rule era for carrying too many digits through to the final answer.

[Professional Engineer]

BUMP!