Calculator Wars at your School

[Steve Simpkin]

(06-20-2021 09:25 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  

(06-20-2021 08:15 PM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  I also remember when I attended my first college level electronics class in 1980 that there was still a giant working model of a slide rule hanging at the front of the classroom. One day we did a series of complex calculations that took about 5 minutes on our calculators. The instructor pointed to the giant slide rule and said a few years ago we were still using slide rules in this class and the problem we just did in 5 minutes took about 40 minutes to finish. Most of us were shocked since even in 1980 most of us had never used a slide rule.

Hmmm... I'd say someone was not very skilled at the slide rule! Someone who's skilled at it should be able to get answers just about as quickly as with a calculator. The big difference came when calculators became programmable and could carry out ten instructions per second. That's where I left the slide rule behind.

Yes, he mentioned since this was a 101 elementary electronics class that he also taught students how to use a slide rule so much of that 40 minute time may have been spent assisting students with using their slide rules on the problem. I also recall that the problems we were working on required a number of polar->rectangular and rectangular->polar conversions which require more steps using a slide rule vs entering two numbers and pressing a conversion key on a calculator. We were free to use any scientific calculator model we wanted but he did recommend choosing one that had those conversations built-in. My HP-25 had that and was programmable. I remember more than once writing a short program to do something repetitive in class.