I actually think there'd be a (small, incel) market for that!

My fathers:

Slide rule graft item which I'm guessing came from the 60's (fits in a shirt pocket behind a pocket protector!)

Eshbach handbook of engineering fundamentals ~1951

My brother had stacks of USB sticks, er, I mean punch cards in my parents basement that somehow dwindled down to one card which remains in my possession. I took a scavenger hunt prize with it.

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http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1606968580.jpg

Dr. Clayton T. Crowe was my Fluid Mechanics prof at WSU. Interesting guy.

Very cool stuff!

^^^ Punch cards ... there's nothing like a huge 370 Assembler program in a deck of cards ... just don't drop them ;).

I was very adept at doing hexadecimal arithmetic in my head .... for a byte or two. The best calculators ever .... those that did hex conversions/math!

And Boolean Algebra .... the basis of any "logic class"... my prof wanted me to tutor others ... sorry... you either get "it" or you don't imo.

I did my first programming in Fortran. I learned the HARD way that one should number their cards in sequence.:(

I learned BASIC at 11 and FORTRAN by the time I was 12 or 13. I primarily programmed in FORTRAN 77. But I picked up PASCAL and a few others (C,C++, Prolog, Lisp, etc.).

I never had to program with cards, I started on an interactive timesharing system (PR1ME 300, PR1ME 550/750 System Manager). I did have to work with a "Batch" style system at Texas A&M. Later I worked with DEC PDP-11 and VAX/Micro-VAX systems.

At the end of High School, when the other System Managers were going into CS (Which was a fairly new Degree Program), I went into Engineering. I took all of my computer knowledge and applied it to engineering.

Yeah. TWO rubber bands. Life lesson.

When I was 13, I was asked to work with 8 year olds and see if we could teach them to program. It was a failure. I suggested (This is 1978), that we work with the kids to familiarize them with how to use the computer and run programs. Later, with more "logic", they could start to program. And again, this would probably occur in Middle-school, 7th grade or so.

First year EE at Rutgers we were still using punch cards. Then went to 8" floppies, but the programs were still run in batch overnight. Lines at the terminals were a few hours long, so I would type in the program on a CP/M machine, then just print it on the engineering printer so the output would match.

I may have some 8" floppies, but no more bookmarks (punchcards)

My first home printer was a modified teletype. 110 characters a minute, all caps. I'd start a printout, and come pack a few hours later.

Ok, as a convenient storage device, the Hollerith punch card was/is a disaster, BUT

From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the punch card sorter was a hypnotic machine that I loved to watch do its magic!



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When I entered college ('78), I had never seen a computer, and the student computer room was full of card punches ... and one "interactive terminal" in the corner that three upper class geeks used. Behind the window (to hand in punch cards) were a Burroughs 6800, Vax, and PDP-11s ... but we had a link to an IBM 370 at Research Triangle Park. By '80, the Comp. Science dept went from less than 100, to 1000 and the cards had virtually disappeared. Gimme access to the machines .... that's all I needed :D.

Great demonstration of how far technology has come.
IBM and VAX (the ugly red headed step child of the computing world) machines of that era only had 1 card reader, 1 Console, multiple tape drives, 1 or more printers.


For reference....

That cell phone that is so seductively in the back pocket of the cute girl in front of you in line, has at minimum 3,000,000,000 (yep with a B) transistors in it. I have read, but never counted, that 8,000,000,000 transistors is a more likely number.

If you built a cell phone out of discreet components, it would be larger than the Empire State building.

EBDIC was the card format?
Hexadecimal?

Extended Binary Digital Interface Code

You disspeeeeeled EBCDIC .... yep, I can still read it, ASCII ... not so much :). I was a systems progrmmer later on .... reading/analyizing dumps & traces ... I thrived on those :).

C1 = A (alpha)

Of course it's all binary in the machine, but

1100 0001 = C1

which leads us to Hexadecimal math :D.

I had the "gift of geek" ;)

HAD....

my speeeeling and tuping here are proof ....

and I don't pwoofread :D

you sound like an anti-VAXer

I can convert back and forth between binary and decimal in my head all day long and subnet IPs and come up with the least number of "subnets" to create a range of addresses. I get hex, and can do the conversions, but it's much slower. I wrote a research paper on number systems (binary, base 4, octal, hex, decimal) when I was 13, but I've never really had to use hex other than looking at MAC addresses.

I've wanted a circular slide rule for years (since I realized they were a thing). My birthday is this month, and they've been on my mind for the past month or two, so I finally got around to buying one.

This will probably be here towards the end of the week.

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http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1724022541.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1724022541.jpg

..so XP31= R/(L*X30)-2*X31)



..methinks R and L are global constants or variables.

...and never copy a deck without verify on or card numbers....

...and most certainly don't drop the deck while you are being real smart and taking your new deck across the room just pushing the two end cards towards the centre.

...and never trust a Texas Instruments card reader, also known as the world's fastest card shredder and card hurler.

D.

....believe it or not, I grew up with this slide rule....still sits beside my computer and serves as an apocalypse backup device.

Some of us old dogs still know how to use one....

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D.

The card format was EBDIC
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange character

Heck. I thought you were going to show us your new Curta!!

Being a retired Electrical Engineer, it's puzzling (and F'in Frustrating) at times how very little little people actually know, understand, and can grasp electrical theory. Yes you have to learn what a Amp Watt and Volt are. People use AC and DC electricity every waking second of their life. Should be basic Jr High schooling.

we had a giant wooden slide rule up in a classroom when i was in college, presumably to be used to teach how to use them.

we took it down one day and tried to figure out how to use it, pre google, and couldnt figure it out.

this was around 2008ish.

No, but I did get one of these a while back.

https://image.invaluable.com/housePh...9_original.jpg

I'm glad to see this thread still kicking.

Does anybody here actually have a Curta? Pics if you've got one, please...

And in case anybody cares, Rotring is making the 600 again!:

https://www.rotring.com/pens-pencils/pencils/rotring-600-mechanical-pencil-1/SAP_1904443.html

Have you used the Rotring 600 in 0.5? Is lead breakage a problem? Thats my number one complaint about 0.5 mechanical pencils and I would pay the 25 bucks Rotring is asking for one, if that one problem was solved.

I have an old 600 that's been dropped too many times and the tip got bent beyond repair - it just powders lead.

I bought one of the new 600's in 0.5mm a few months ago. It hasn't left my home office desk. I've never dropped it. It doesn't break lead.

I have a book by a house builder where everything was ‘computed’ using an angle square. It was clear he was clever but also that he literally couldnt do the math. It was an enjoyable read.

Something similar, im too young and have had solvers and speadsheets my entire career. Who does linear algebra by hand? The charm is that it scales and computers can do it.

Matrix math on a handheld is novel but also useless, and serious stuff today the linear algebra is symbolic. Point is it might be possible to build apollo without computers and large screens, but really soon its the process of using inadequate tools that dominates.

I always had an hp on my desk, eventually loved a wp34 for simple stuff, but if it took more than a minute id use a spreadsheet so i could review my work.

With google sheets and automatic cloud storage its become a habit i don’t regret. I wonder how future generations will relate?

I went to engineering school in the transition period between slide rules, etc. and computers/calculators (late 70s/early 80s). So I never used a slide rule. Here is a cool Texas Instruments Ti 59 I bought at an estate sale. The guy was an engineer for Dow Chemical. Included were several dozen program cards for various things he did. Most are dated 1980. And it all works - even the thermal printer! I was always an HP guy and used similar programmable HP calculators over the years.

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Through about the mid-80s we were still drawing by hand. I started out as a draftsman (ink on mylar).

And remember, they're not pencils, they're lead holders :D

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Lifetime supply! I still have - and use frequently - my Koh-I-Noor Technograph lead holders and after 40 plus years they still work perfectly.

Probably in the early 80s I bought a Casio FX-820. At the time, this was about the coolest thing around! I did some programming on it and used it for some hydrology calcs I was doing at the time. I found this NOS one a few years ago.

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http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1724264540.jpg

In the 70s I spent countless hours using the K&E Leroy lettering system. The title blocks and other major labels were done with this system. Notes and dimensions were done freehand.

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Very cool!

I had an HP 32SII (RPN). It was killed in a move or storage or something. It looks like they are available out there. I have RPN calc apps on my PC and phone. RPN just makes so much more sense to me, seems super efficient. I've debated getting one of the HPs off of ebay, but I suspect it'd be close to $100 to get one in good working shape, and it would mostly sit around unused.

I had a TI-Voyage 200 for a while. It would solve differential and integration problems.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2WYdlpUh1aU/maxresdefault.jpg

The successor is the 35something. I "graduated" my 32SII to home use for preservation. The new version has (for all I can tell as a simple user) the same functionality but the physical interface just isn't the same.

Life before AutoCAD :D The office I worked in early on was an engineering department at a municipality, about 1/3 this size. Smoking was allowed and we had 2 guys who smoked cheap cigars. It was horrible but that's the way it was.

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I think this would fit on the "engineering" side of things. I like to measure things. I used to have a really nice personal weather station (damn, I wish I'd kept it!), I like full gauges in my cars regardless of level of appliance.

I've been able to pick up some stuff to measure things in the last year at really good deals.

I've had the vernier caliper for years. I'm not even sure where I got it, but I'm pretty sure that it was free. I got a Starrett 0-1" micrometer at the same time that's not in the photo. I've got, I think, an old Lufkin 2-3" micrometer in a box somewhere too that I acquired in the past year or two.

When I got the Starrett 12" dial caliper, I realized that I had to get a 6" because a dial caliper is so much easier to read than the vernier. I bought the Sears because I didn't think I'd be able to get a Starrett at a reasonable price, and then bam, 6" Starrett at a reasonable price. And both of the Starretts are "good ones" (made in USA).

I'd never heard of Brown & Sharp, so bought one of those just because. Starrett 0-1" micrometer, just because it was so cheap, came with a standard, and has a patent date from 1897.

I just got the "The Executive Pocket Chum" in the mail today. There have been times when I needed something from the hardware store, but taking the 6" caliper was a pain. The pocket chum (would probably be a very different product with a name like that if it was sold today) will be great for that sort of thing.
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I did similar, internship working at a small materials handling engineering design consultants maybe 10 -15 people.
Even the principal worked on a drawing board, preparing accurate design layouts and calculations, which were all hand done with the aid of a HP calculator maybe.
The inertern or junior engineers would then check the design calculations against the design codes etc. as well learn how to draw. That's the way we learnt our trade, that was mid to late '70s plus plenty of smoke stains on the ceilings.
Now it's a lot, lot different and the drafting tools, engineering software available are at a whole different level.
________________________________
Peter Kaufmann
'04 Subaru WRX modified
'73 Porsche 911e Targa 2.7 mfi
'73 Porsche 911t Coupe 2.8 webers

^^^ which reminds me of one of the most useful tools: the electric eraser. There were constant revisions to the designs and the need for precision erasing and re-drawing. That was always fun! :rolleyes:

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