[MRM]

I went to high school just as calculators were widely available. I never had to use a slide rule but I was close enough to that era that the teachers showed us theirs. We also had tests that barred calculators so we had to do the equation to figure out whatever it was we were supposed to use to solve the problem that was actually being tested. By the time I graduated calculators were allowed pretty much across the board.

My wife did inherit her grandfather's slide rule. It is ivory and has a velvet pouch. There are finger grooves worn into it from use. Her mother spent her career as a statistician in China. She was trained on an abacus and still used it well into the 1990s because she was faster on it than a calculator for some problems.