Believe it or not I rented one for $5 for one day with only those capabilities to assist me through one semester final exam that was very heavy on straight math.
Anyone younger than us cannot imagine working with trigonometry without a handy dandy pocket calculator or full-blown computer.?ÿ We remember when neither was available.?ÿ Making the leap from the basic four-function pocket calculator to one that had trig functions was like losing one's virginity.?ÿ A momentous and, quite possibly, a very expensive event.
Somewhere in my parents stuff, exists and old plug in wall wart only powered Rockwell calculator with red numeral leds( might be the 18R) and I'm sure as it snows at the North and South Poles, it works today.
@holy-cow Yeah, I took out a loan from my bank to buy that first HP.?ÿ Of course I was still a full time student and part time surveyor at the time.?ÿ I believe it cost $350, which at the time was a lot of money for a poor broke student.?ÿ we were not allowed to use calculators on final exams until my senior year.?ÿ The reasoning was that the cost was so high (for the good ones) that until everyone could afford one no one was allowed to use them.
Andy
Yes. Sir.?ÿ That would have been 200 hours of work @$1.75 per hour with no withholding.
By 8th grade (1976-77) I had access to one of these bad boys....
@james-fleming At that time, you would have been the object of my envy!
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Multiplication on a slide rule is really the addition of logarithms. So, technically you can say that is addition.
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So the building is no longer directly connected to the foundation? Not a civil engineer but I always thought the purpose of the foundation was to connect the columns to the bedrock or solid earth. I saw that there is a new foundation where it was relocated. So the building is just laying on top of the new foundation?
I have no knowledge of that.
3 of my five HP 41CX's were assembled in Singapore - the other 2 in Oregon.
In the 1970's I worked with a retired mechanical engineer. We were talking one day and he revealed that he had designed the roof of the Coliseum in Phoenix, AZ using a slide rule. The roof is a hyperbolic-paraboloid, a hyperbola in one axis and a parabola in the other. He calculated the finished roof elevations on a 1-foot grid and then calculated his way downward at each point to design the supporting trusses and beams underneath. Blew my mind even though I had gotten an A in my slide-rule class at DeVry a few years earlier. He said he had worked on it every day for about a year and a half.
Sounds like an HP-35. I'm looking at mine right now - kind of sad, no useable battery pack...
