All I remember in the 70's is having to spend about $89 to buy a Corvus 411 calculator that ran for a few days on four AA Cells or you could just plug it in. It had 8 digits precision and algebraic logic, 8 functions, 24 keys and an LED display. What's astounding is, I just opened the junk drawer in my desk and I still have it. The power supply wire is epoxied into the calculator. I just mentioned that so I could tell you I'm really interested in the rest of your story about the 10K.

Anyone know where I can get a couple of new metal curser frames for my K&E 4081-3 Log Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule for a reasonable price? They seem to have dissolved, or oxidized away.

I am one of those who think that one of the duties of being a father is to teach his kids early to memorize the multiplication table (up to 12 x 12). Both our sons did it quickly and well. Our older son, at age 9, asked me to buy him a calculator. I managed to avoid doing that, fearing that using the calculator would diminish his mental calculation abilities. At about the same time he started distributing the local newspaper to the homes in the neighborhood. As soon as he earned enough, he bought himself a TI calculator. Without a doubt, it greatly increased his interest in mathematics, numbers and calculations, mental or not. Today, he is the VP for strategic planning and initiatives of a huge corporation. I learned.

Also, 80085 spells "boobs" that was extremely funny in the 4th grade.

Before smartphones, we used our graphing calculators to learn basic programming. We learned how to program games that we could play to pass the time at school. The games ranged from simple pong or pac man, to a game called drug war, that we had lots of fun customizing to create hilarious situations...

Sorry, no offense was meant.

As a former Marine I think Annapolis and one of my best friends went to AF academy.

Figured the "College" in quotes and the engineering emphasis meant a service academy.

Of course had I put up Hudson High you would have been more offended :)

Annapolis? AF Academy?

I find it somewhat humorous that a Teaching Assistant was berating you for using an electronic assistant.

They show you a graph or they show averages (or averages of averages) or they show "adjusted" data. They also do not provide their algorithms for adjustment.

The odd and even numbers check only works if the person faking it is too dumb to check it himself/herself and fake the numbers to cover it up.

Detecting fake data requires that the person who made it missed fixing the data or did not know what should be fixed to make it have a real appearance. Global Warming Science has this practice down to an art form, or at least it seems so. If not for email fubar we may have never known just how rigged that data was.

The sad thing is that I would bet you are the oddity even in the CE programs. Most fail to program the calculator and go through the motions the slow and rather inefficient way.

I haven't done one of those in a while. Will look into it. Thanks.

Were you to read the accompanying text for Rule 13 you would find Will Strunk's suggestions. "... not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." E. B. White said that Strunk found that he had omitted so many needless words that he had time to spare in his lectures. "Omit needless words; omit needless words; omit needless words," he would whisper.

Thank you.

Not my story -- When Laurel and I were talking civil engineering classes at New Mexico State (1978-1979), the ASCE student trophy case had Bob Brittan's sliderule. He finished four years with a perfect four-point. The slip stick was worn and beaten. In fact, I think that the first part of the CD was torn off at the far left. We were looking at it in wonder and someone else asked how you could use it. One professor pointed out that you just work the problem a different way, but another professor said that you don't need a calculator to get through his courses. The light went on! I never had his classes, but I saw some tests: You do the algebra or trig or maybe calculus, and the numerical answer is easy. (See Ashinoff here on the 25 kids who used algebra without a calculator.)

BTW, I have sliderules. In fact, some years back, Keuffel and Esser advertised in an engineering magazine (Industrial Research maybe) that they had a crate in a warehouse. Send them an SASE or something and get a free slide rule. Since then, I picked up a couple at second-hand stores. I have a nice one in a leather case for your belt. I wear it at science fiction conventions and such. "It is the formal computing device of a Jedi physicist, an elegant tool from a simpler time, from before the dark times and the empire."

About 1982 or so, in response to the creation of a computer science department at our community college, my physics instructor said, "We had sliderules, but no one majored in them."

Love RPN. I don't bother with anything but the Unix/Linux "dc" program, because it's old, reliable RPN.

ps. I see a few Luddites are out today. Ironically posting to the Internet about the dangers of technology.