Calculator Wars at your School

[johnb]

(06-22-2022 07:22 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  

(06-22-2022 06:14 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Maybe someday I'll be in a position to make videos to demonstrate. The slide rule is quick, if you're skilled. However, every video demonstration I've seen shows that the operator didn't know how to quickly get a vernier effect with the fingers to home in on super accurate settings of the slide or even the cursor. I am out of practice now, but I stand by what I said. When I was using it all the time, I really could get answers just about as quickly as I could with a calculator. It doesn't take any skill or much understanding to punch buttons though, which was a major attraction for the calculator.

The instructor 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. These were also fairly complex problems involving multi-step formulas and R->P conversions. The excerpt below (from the HP-27 Owner's Handbook) shows an example of calculating the AC impedance on a simple resistor-inductor-capacitor circuit. If memory serves, the problems had a number of these circuits in parallel and we also had to calculate the voltage and currents across some of the components. There were a *lot* of calculation steps involved and it was complex even using a calculator to do it.

I can confirm the speed of a SKILLED slipstick operator. When I started college in 1980, my chemistry professor would hold calculation races in the last few minutes of class: he and his trusty slide rule, against his entire class, all on calculators. He won about 75% of the time with answers to 3 digits precision. If there were big swings of unit conversions, he'd win hands down because he just slid the decimal point around in his head while doing the more important calculations on the rule (while most students were typing 1000x 1000x 1000x).

Mostly I didn't bother to compete: I'd watch his amazing show! Zip! Zap! The hand moves quicker than the eye, the answer is nine-pi! He would carry intermediate results right on the scales; he knew the vernier tricks and all sorts of others. He was amazingly fast.