“I recall hearing the same sort of nonsense many years ago, when some education professors declared that due to the pervasiveness of calculators, children no longer needed to learn basic math.”
Every now and then, I get out the old bamboo slide rule and give it a spin just to see if I still remember how it works.
I missed out on slide rules by a couple of years... I hit high school about the time that electronic calculators were coming down in price, even the full featured scientific calcs - like the Texas Instruments SR-50.
So while I did get a gift of a slide rule from an uncle who was an engineer with McDonell Douglass, I never did learn to use it.
Mark