[bert]

believe it or don’t but I actually had one of those circa 1950 model or so . I used it in 1963/64 school years my Jr and sr years.

My professor in CE314 Estimating and Costs said all of you got a type writer to go to college...... sell it and buy a calculator.

The one I bought was old and used and had a hand crank and lever. it was humongous. It allowed the rapid computation of complex estimate spread sheets that simply couldn’t be done on the trusty K&E log log decitrig slide rule

[imardmd1]

Ah, yes. My senior engineering year was 1962 - - finished up actually in the fall semester. I did a project that required performing a linear regression of the line by least-squares analysis of the data points, The college let me take home a Friden calculator, and I spent many night going clackety-clack to do the multipllication of the x and y values of the points. Took a lot of time. but it worked. Could not have reasonably done it by hand. Life was (is) too short.

But that Friden calculator helped prepare my senior thesis, presented at the 1962 annual Gordon Research Conference by my advisor.

Twenty years later, I could do all this with a Sharp hand-held calculator with a little LCD screen. Just enter in the data pairs, then hit a button, and one got the predicted constants for the y = mx + b equation as well as the standard deviation predicted. Taught my lab technicians how to analyze our experimental results with the hand calculators.

About the same time, I saw that Lotus 1-2-3 made it possible to do matrix multiplication using a spreadsheet, and used it to conduct experimental design and evaluation of the results that comprised ten variables. What a difference!