I'm dating myself, but I had a Curta Calculator back in the 60's. I was involved in road rallies and calculating speeds to make the next checkpoint was the job it was used for. If you had to slow down, you could figure out what speed you needed to go to make the average.
I wish I still had it. They bring big bucks on eBay right now.
At the Wikipedia page so kindly provided by cynwoody it mentions auto rallies as a popular use for the Curtas, and it all looks like grand screaming fun. I'm sure that you had a great time and provided an essential service for the races.
I wish I still had it. They bring big bucks on eBay right now.
The passage of time reminds us all that we should have each invested in a huge warehouse decades ago and filled it with all of the consumer products that were available at the time, then locked the door to this time capsule, only reopening it now so that we can sell it all on eBay :-)
If a time machine is invented during my lifetime, I want to take a big pile of cash back to the 1950's or 1960's and get a nice sports car, put it in the warehouse on blocks and then re-sell it in 2006 with zero miles on it :-)
(I also want to get in on the ground floor at McDonald's corp and a few other stocks that people didn't think would amount to much at the time but have since turned into multibillion dollar ventures)
I suppose that will never happen, because nobody has ever encountered a time traveler. This suggests that a time machine will never, ever be invented.
"sigh"