Know How To Use a Slide Rule? 388
high_rolla writes "How many of you have actually used a slide rule? The slide rule was a simple yet powerful and important tool for engineers and scientists before the days of calculators (let alone PCs). In fact, several people I know still prefer to use them. In the interest of preserving this icon we have created a virtual slide rule for you to play with." Wikipedia lists seven other online simulations.
Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
back in the day (Score:2, Interesting)
Buy your own! (Score:3, Interesting)
My mother recently bought one in a wave of nostalgia. I can certainly understand the physical appeal - the soft susurration of the pieces gliding against each other, the comforting grip of the leather carrying case, the art of perfectly lining up the dashes to the limits of human precision. If computers were that tactilely slick, nerds might rule the world.
Um No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I live in the 21st century, I don't really lose sleep over those things.
Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
They are also just good things to have around. A good slide rule (Aristo, Nestler, Faber-Castell, etc) is just such a fantastically well-made device that you really need to see it to appreciate. The precision is something you don't see these days. Even a lowly Pickett is nicely made.
Brett
Re:No, and what the hell is the index line? (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hooray for progress (Score:3, Interesting)
If you wanted to rebuild society - what would you use? Yes - things like sliderules. Think of it is a method of survival, rather than - we have better why would you bother to learn how to use sliderules.
One of the reasons I thought it was fun to learn morse code back in the day when I got my amateur radio license. Morse code happens to be the most fundamental mode you can use to communicate over the airwaves. If you had nothing, and needed to build a radio from scratch you could build a set to do morse code in an evening or two - where as something to do PSK/GMSK, FM/AM, SSB etc would take quite a bit longer.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
E.g., divide 52 by 7 on a calculator, and it will spit out 7.428571428571, a completely correct although ridiculous answer when dealing with real-world quantities, since it blows away the precision of the input numbers. Slide rules require you to constantly consider the number of decimal places that you want, and encourage you to only write down the correct number of digits (so you might do the same result and put down 7.4).
Personally, I think some of the best engineering ever accomplished by man has been conducted mostly by slide rules. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we've necessarily regressed since then -- computers are great, don't get me wrong -- but it's not right to simply write off slide rules. They had very distinct benefits and I think students would be well suited if they were kept around as a pedagogical tool.
Re:Of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I HATE THE SLIDE RULE. (Score:3, Interesting)
What's sad is a good 4 function calculator costs 1/10th a slide rule does.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear slide rule. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh yeah! Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Late to the party, but still love slide rules (Score:3, Interesting)
Dad was an engineer. I learned how to use a slide rule for basic math in first grade, just because "it was neat" -- after all, if dad the engineer uses one, it must be cool.
One of my math classes "required" a TI-82 (Jr. High), since some of the problems were of the "push these buttons in this order to graph this equation" type. After that, most kids went out and bought the latest and greatest TI graphing calculators. I was given a TI-86 when they were first released, as "the calculator that will do anything you need it to through college" by my parents. It was neat for a while, some of the games were cool, and programming in assembly for it was kinda fun - at least much more so than paying attention in Early American Literature. But I didn't use it for my math classes. I was the nerd in the back of the room using dad's old slide rule while everyone else was punching buttons on their calculators.
I continued using a slide rule for most problems until my senior year in college, when I switched over to a TI-89 because I was extremely lazy and it made the statistics class much easier (it did all the work anywhere where we weren't required to "show our work").
I still have it, and still use it out in the shop on occasion. My TI-86, TI-89, and HP-48G+ sit gathering dust.
Observations (Score:2, Interesting)
The main thing I notice about slide rules versus calculators, is that in many computations, the user is required to be aware of certain techniques, often involving logarithmic properties. And in many calculations, you see a *range* around a solution, not just a number popping up like on a calculator.
Slide rule users tend to have a natural ability to estimate the magnitude of a solution, and do not find sigfigs and scientific notation (with a single digit mantissa) to be an unusual idea.
One nonobvious consequence of electronic calculators has been to push the understanding of log properties from early grade school arithmetic, into at least middle school territory, and I know for a fact that many College Algebra students today have difficulty with logarithms. In the slide rule era, there was *no way* a student would get out of grade school math without naturally being very comfortable with logarithms, and how to relate multiplcation to the sum of logs.
Re:I HATE THE SLIDE RULE. (Score:3, Interesting)