Slide Rules & Electronic Tools

I remember the first one I ever saw.

It was 1972, and I was a sophomore in college. I was walking across campus when I spotted a nerd coming out of the engineering building with something strapped to his hip, like a gunfighter in a John Wayne movie.

I’m sure he thought he was a NASA scientist.

It was big. It was clunky. It was heavy. But that contraption represented one of the first steps in how our world was about to change.

It was a Texas Instruments calculator, known officially as a TI 2500 Datamath.  

Up until then, everybody did calculations by hand or used a slide rule, which was an amazing invention in its own right. Once you learned how to operate it, you could multiply and divide much faster than doing it on notebook paper. 

For those of you who have never seen or even heard of this device (which includes millennials, and all who came after them), a slide rule looked like a mutated ruler. It was a long, narrow instrument, usually made of wood or plastic, with numbers and markings running along its length. A section in the middle slid back and forth, allowing you to perform calculations by lining up the digits. 

Of course, college students, occasionally put it to some nefarious uses. The first departmentalized exam I ever took as a freshman was in biology, and there were hundreds of people in the auditorium. Since we were also being tested on our lab work, we were allowed to use slide rules for computations. One guy sitting several rows below me held up his instrument, smirked at his buddies,  and asked one of the test monitors, “Hey is this kind of slide rule ok?”

The proctor replied,“Yeah, let me see it,” and snatched it from his his hand. Upon sliding back the middle section, he discovered all the formulas we were supposed to memorize. The stunned student was quickly escorted out of the building. I don’t know what happened, but I never saw him again. I honestly believe they threw him in the Black Warrior River with a millstone around his neck.

But slide rules were about to become museum pieces. The electronic calculator had arrived.You cut it on, punched in some numbers that glowed red on a little screen, then hit the add, subtract, multiply or divide button.  In a nanosecond, you had the correct answer, right down to the last decimal place. 

Unless you were in the daylight, near a window, or in a room with bright lighting. Then you had to cup your hands over the screen or put a blanket over your head.   

The first time I saw one do a long division problem, I checked the answer with pencil and paper just to make sure it was correct. It was. This thing was right out of a James Bond movie. 

And the 1972 price tag of $150 left me shaken, not stirred.

Thankfully, I was a business major, because at the time, all these early calculators could do was simple arithmetic - add, subtract, multiply and divide. That was all I needed. There were no square roots, sines or cosines, even percentages. It was vanilla as vanilla could get. However, everyone soon discovered an unintended function: the numbers 07734 turned upside down spelled ‘hello’.

The semester after Christmas break it was obvious Santa Claus had entered the electronic age because suddenly, calculators were popping up in algebra, accounting, and statistics classes like mushrooms on a cow patty. 

Calculators were generally accepted without question on college campuses. However, I heard that a lot of high school math teachers viewed them as some kind of wicked sorcery. Witchcraft, even.

“You won’t always have a calculator with you,” they warned their students.

That prediction aged like month-old milk.

Nowadays, you can get a calculator in a convenience store for under five bucks. Companies use them as giveaways. Not only do I have a calculator with me everywhere I go, I don’t even have to punch in the numbers. I just ask Siri to do the calculations.

But, if Siri ever answers one of my questions sounding like HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’m digging out my slide rule again.

Joe Hobby is an award-winning columnist and long-time writer for Jay Leno.  His first book, Some Things Are Worth Remembering is now available.  For more information and how to order, go to www.joehobby.com

Contact him at jhobby2000@aol.com