Students’ calcs in the 70s/80s

[trojdor]

(12-27-2023 10:15 PM)lrdheat Wrote:  In 1972/73, one could easily recognize science students (Florida State University) by the slide rule leather holster hanging from their belts. In 1973, 2 desk chairs in the meteorology library had the miraculous HP 35’s locked to the desks in special cradles for use by students. By 1975, slide rules were largely gone (I still have mine as well as my dad’s HP 35 that he purchased in 1973, still in mint working condition on my desk at the TV station)!

Funny story;
In 1973, me and 2 other engineering students stopped into a McDonalds in Chicago, for dinner.
We had just come from our last class at school, and were still (proudly) wearing our Teledyne Post Versalog II slide rules on our belt.

When we went back to the car, there were two cops waiting for us, with guns drawn.
Turns out, they had received a call about 3 youth carrying machetes on their belts at McD's, LOL!
Once they saw what we were actually carrying, it was funny....but it was pretty tense, at first.

As far as trust during exams goes, it would have been hard to cheat with the kind of tests we typically took.
They were more problems involving complex engineering, requiring multiple steps in the process to show you truly understood what you were doing.

However, there was one trick you could do with the HP45, if you wanted to cheat a little.
Since those early HPs didn't have continuous memory, all we had to do was show the instructor the screen was blank (and therefore supposedly OFF) before the test started.

Turns out, if you leave the calculator on, and just press the decimal point, the display APPEARS to be off (especially from across a bright room)....as the only character in the display is that small decimal segment...but you had 9 memory registers that could still have info in them.

Wasn't very useful, it turned out....but we felt we were being clever, lol.


Mike