Doug Pensinger wrote: > > Dan Minette wrote: > > > > >OK, since we're playing the oldest stuff game here. What is the oldest > >computer everyone here has worked on? I think mine (which I've mentioned > >before) is the oldest, but I'd be curious to see who might beat me. :-) > > > Do you remember the math machines - kind of mechanical computers - that > they used to have. If I recall correctly, you would type in a number > pull a lever, type in an operation and another number and pull the lever > and it would calculate the answer. My Dad used to take me to work with > him on weekends and sit me down on those things (I was ~ 11) and we > played on them for hours. Obviously this was a few years before the > hand heald calculator was introduced. > > How many here ever used a slide rule?
Define "use".
One presumes it means "practicing physics or engineering in 1972 when the HP-35 went on sale for $395 (cheap!) . . . "
Chewing on it for teething purposes count? :) If so, I was using one before I was 18 months old, maybe even before I was a year old.
Presumably not an aluminum-alloy Pickett plank . . .
I *have* used the two that I inherited from my father, on occasions where it was just easier to whip it out and use it for an approximation rather than use a calculator and get a degree of precision that I really didn't need. (And yes, one of them has toothmarks on it.)
-- Ronn! :)
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