My First Calculator

The tiny hand-held calculator is ubiquitous. They’re small, cheap and utterly reliable. You can pick one up at Staples or Walmart for five bucks. A calculator makes simple computing easy and sweat-free. No more long division scribbled in the corner of your paper. No more

memorizing times tables (but you really should memorize them anyway). And now, you don’t even need a separate device, the calculator is built into your phones.

When they first arrived in schools, it was like a miracle - but the electronic calculator wasn’t the first, it just replaced one that we were already using.

I am old enough to remember a time before hand-held calculators. When I was in high school, one of the items on our school supply list was another kind of calculator. It was called a slide rule.

You don’t realize it, but you just saw people using a slide rule. There is a scene in Apollo 13, were the mission control engineers need to do some quick calculations and they whip out a slide rule to do so. The technical accuracy of this scene in the movie can be debated. 

It might have just been a way for the director to show off some obsolete technology in the film, but it is true that each Apollo astronaut few with a slide rule - they just don’t show it in the movie. 

My graduating class was the last group of students who learned how to use, and actually used slide rules in science class. 

A few years ago I bought a slide rule on eBay. I have a collection of obsolete objects and a slide rule was one thing I needed to have in my collection.

I do not recall how to use a slide rule anymore, but, back in the day, I was pretty good. I was quick and accurate.