Though the weekend wasn't a lot of fun given the focus, I did get the chance to connect again with a lot of my family. It might be a good thing to do a family gathering without it being prompted by a tragic event. Somewhere along the line during the weekend, I obtained my dad's old slide rule. It's a K&E N4081-3 Log Log Duplex model, and was quite the high tech for its time. Couple it with the Smith Carona typewriter my mom used back in the day, and I've got the late 1940's portable computer! Word processor, spreadsheet, calculator... it's all there!
Back in 1975 (I think) I bought a plastic slide rule to compare my newly discovered abilities on it against the calculator we had in the house. It was a clunky thing that could do basic arithmetic only. It might have been accurate to more decimal places, but I could do logs and more esoteric calculations much faster on the slide rule than I could with that calculator.
That all changed though at the end of 1977, when I got my first portable calculator as a Christmas gift: the Texas Instruments SR51-II. It wasn't as cool as my friends' HPs with RPN, though. Still, I was fascinated with the thing, and would play with numbers for hours. One of the funnest (yes, funnest) things I remember doing was calculating the distance to a star using parallaxes. What. A. Nerd. I still remember that the highest number I could quickly generate was 69!. Little did I know at that age the magic of that particular number...
At any rate, for your viewing pleasure, the portable computing tools of the last part of the 1940s.
Back in 1975 (I think) I bought a plastic slide rule to compare my newly discovered abilities on it against the calculator we had in the house. It was a clunky thing that could do basic arithmetic only. It might have been accurate to more decimal places, but I could do logs and more esoteric calculations much faster on the slide rule than I could with that calculator.
That all changed though at the end of 1977, when I got my first portable calculator as a Christmas gift: the Texas Instruments SR51-II. It wasn't as cool as my friends' HPs with RPN, though. Still, I was fascinated with the thing, and would play with numbers for hours. One of the funnest (yes, funnest) things I remember doing was calculating the distance to a star using parallaxes. What. A. Nerd. I still remember that the highest number I could quickly generate was 69!. Little did I know at that age the magic of that particular number...
At any rate, for your viewing pleasure, the portable computing tools of the last part of the 1940s.
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