I've still got my two sliderules in a draw right next to me....together with my first calculator, the venerable HP-45.
But what I always lusted after was a Curta that was advertised in the back of Scientific American. Never knew anyone who had one.
There is a very interesting story around it's development in Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp by an prisoner.
I was fortunate (perhaps) to start my MechEng degree when we were using slide rules and imperial....and by the time I finished it was all calculators and SI units. I do admit that it took me a few years....I partied hard and believe it or not, University education in the early 70's Australia was not only free, I was paid a government allowance.
Perhaps the only really good thing about using a slide rule aside from the super nerd look it gave you is that it really trained one to make quick back of an envelope 'reality check' calculations to get the order of magnitude correct. This is because the slide rule only gave you a number....not where the decimal point is. I still do this in my head and can quickly say that an answer is say around 35....do the real calculation and see that it is 32.4532 and then be confident that I have it right.
But I can't think of anything good to say about imperial units. For example we had to convert all masses to 'slugs' before we would perform our force/acceleration calculations.
[A slug is a mass that accelerates by 1 ft/s2 when a force of one pound-force (lbF) is exerted on it]
When we switched to SI it was wonderful....all the calculations just fell out without having to insert a bunch of conversion factors. Apply one newton to one kilogram and it accelerates at one meter per second squared. Lovely!
And how's about rods and perches and links and chains and roods and poles and furlongs.....What? SI rules!
