What a blast from the past. I can draw a direct line from my encountering a slide rule to ending up as a programmer. I owe my career to that device.
I was a nerdy 10 year old kid who liked doing arithmetic in 1970, but didn't know anything particularly advanced. I convinced my parents to get me a slide rule as a Christmas present that year; a basic white Post model 1447 - I know that because I'm looking at it right now. It's been in my desk drawer forever as I could never convince myself to throw it away, even though I've long since lost the sliding cursor.
Anyway, I got the slide rule, had fun with basic multiplication/division, but didn't understand what the S, T, and L scales on the back were for. Sine/Tangent/Logarithm? What are those?
Off to the library, where I picked up a Tutor-Text book [0] on trigonometry, discovered I'd better first learn some algebra, picked up another Tutor-Text book on that, and began a two-year tear teaching myself algebra to integral calculus. Which meant I tested out of a couple years of math in high school, ran out of courses to take, and in my junior year was allowed to walk to the local college to take 2nd year Calc classes.
At that college, they started letting me play with the computers, both an IBM 5100 APL machine over one summer, and hands-on access to the IBM 11/30 clone minicomputer that was the main machine. The math prof pointed me at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming", and that began my transition from pure mathematics to computer programming/science instead. I even wrote a MIXAL assembler/MIX simulator for the minicomputer that the college ended up using to teach an assembly language course.
So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E! And Tutor-Text as well.
Similar background story, I was 8 in 1970, and my father knew what a slide rule was, and how to use it, so I learned a bit of trig from him before repeatedly checking out a textbook on trig from the public library.
True story: my son took an AP physics class in high school, (LASA) taught by sokeone with a PhD in physics. They had an oversized teaching sliderule hanging from the ceiling, where nobody could use it. It had become decoration, as nobody was left to teach with it.
When I was at the school for a “meet your student’s teachers” night, one of the other parents asked about the side rule. Instructor didn’t know how it worked.
So I explained it.
My wife still has her grandfather’s slide rules from when he was the state engineer in the 50s and 60s.
I remember those large teaching slide-rules, but haven't seen one in decades. Great to know they still exist, if only as mysterious artifacts from the dark ages.
Neither of my parents were mathematically inclined, but they were content to let me forage for information on my own, with lots of trips to the library. Amazing how clear are my 50-year-old memories of 10-year-old me sitting on the floor with a trig book, drawing random triangles on paper, measuring them as carefully as I could with ruler and protractor, and verifying the law of sines and cosines with paper and slide-rule. God, I was such a nerd. Paid off well in the end, though :-)
Now I'm retired, and for fun, I work my way through the problems at Project Euler. Four years in, and only two more problems to go to hit 90% complete! It'll probably take me another year+ to finish them all (hopefully).
We end up doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations for various odds-and-ends. I keep a 4’ long teaching slide-rule next to my desk for this purpose. New employees are befuddled. Everyone else just accepts it as a fact-of-life when asking for my help.
I love your story. Thanks for sharing! I think we could have way more stories like this if we were able to provide more enriching environments for kids and properly nourish their curiosity. I think so many young kids love asking questions and the adults around them get fed up with the questions instead of engaging with them in the process of discovery.
Not to mention schools using grades, signed slips, and other extrinsic motivators to encourage conformity and obedience, all the while extinguishing any intrinsic motivation, like curiosity.
I'm sure the way schools look made a lot of sense in the time of industrialisation and the manual labour of the factory worker, but it's crazy we still shape students by that mould when it's so far removed from the creative pursuits we expect them to go on later in life.
“Signed slips”... our son turned 18 half-way through his senior year of high school. So I explained that he could now sign his own excuses for being tardy, and no actually explanation was required.
“Please excuse <name>, I am tardy.” <signature of name>”
If signed slips are ever needed with my children, I plan on doing what my parents did for me: teach the children to self-sign from day one. Their responsibility, their signature.
So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E! And Tutor-Text as well.
I didn't even grow up in this era and I keep buying stuff from eBay purely out of fascination for old ways of doing things. These names on all kinds of things I have horded - architectural templates, drafting machine, cutting mat, compass set, lettering templates, etc.
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful story. Something tells me your career path wouldn’t have changed significantly if you had never touched a slide rule, though :)
Not in quite the same way, but I was inspired by watching Apollo 13 as a kid. I felt like the heroes were the engineers who could do the math and calculate the trajectories and work out the procedure for starting up the LM with low power. I was drawn to the engineering side of software by that. I keep an antique slide rule and some other old engineering instruments on my desk as a reminder of that inspiration.
I went through a very similar evolution, starting with slide rules, at about the same time. You don't mention middle school and high school -- I was very fortunate in having access to Wang and Monroe programmable calculators, and then a PDP-8M.
Still have a few slide rules, includingn Pickett and K&E.
Comments
What a blast from the past. I can draw a direct line from my encountering a slide rule to ending up as a programmer. I owe my career to that device.
I was a nerdy 10 year old kid who liked doing arithmetic in 1970, but didn't know anything particularly advanced. I convinced my parents to get me a slide rule as a Christmas present that year; a basic white Post model 1447 - I know that because I'm looking at it right now. It's been in my desk drawer forever as I could never convince myself to throw it away, even though I've long since lost the sliding cursor.
Anyway, I got the slide rule, had fun with basic multiplication/division, but didn't understand what the S, T, and L scales on the back were for. Sine/Tangent/Logarithm? What are those?
Off to the library, where I picked up a Tutor-Text book [0] on trigonometry, discovered I'd better first learn some algebra, picked up another Tutor-Text book on that, and began a two-year tear teaching myself algebra to integral calculus. Which meant I tested out of a couple years of math in high school, ran out of courses to take, and in my junior year was allowed to walk to the local college to take 2nd year Calc classes.
At that college, they started letting me play with the computers, both an IBM 5100 APL machine over one summer, and hands-on access to the IBM 11/30 clone minicomputer that was the main machine. The math prof pointed me at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming", and that began my transition from pure mathematics to computer programming/science instead. I even wrote a MIXAL assembler/MIX simulator for the minicomputer that the college ended up using to teach an assembly language course.
So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E! And Tutor-Text as well.
[0]: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show
Similar background story, I was 8 in 1970, and my father knew what a slide rule was, and how to use it, so I learned a bit of trig from him before repeatedly checking out a textbook on trig from the public library.
True story: my son took an AP physics class in high school, (LASA) taught by sokeone with a PhD in physics. They had an oversized teaching sliderule hanging from the ceiling, where nobody could use it. It had become decoration, as nobody was left to teach with it.
When I was at the school for a “meet your student’s teachers” night, one of the other parents asked about the side rule. Instructor didn’t know how it worked.
So I explained it.
My wife still has her grandfather’s slide rules from when he was the state engineer in the 50s and 60s.
I remember those large teaching slide-rules, but haven't seen one in decades. Great to know they still exist, if only as mysterious artifacts from the dark ages.
Neither of my parents were mathematically inclined, but they were content to let me forage for information on my own, with lots of trips to the library. Amazing how clear are my 50-year-old memories of 10-year-old me sitting on the floor with a trig book, drawing random triangles on paper, measuring them as carefully as I could with ruler and protractor, and verifying the law of sines and cosines with paper and slide-rule. God, I was such a nerd. Paid off well in the end, though :-)
Now I'm retired, and for fun, I work my way through the problems at Project Euler. Four years in, and only two more problems to go to hit 90% complete! It'll probably take me another year+ to finish them all (hopefully).
We end up doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations for various odds-and-ends. I keep a 4’ long teaching slide-rule next to my desk for this purpose. New employees are befuddled. Everyone else just accepts it as a fact-of-life when asking for my help.
I love your story. Thanks for sharing! I think we could have way more stories like this if we were able to provide more enriching environments for kids and properly nourish their curiosity. I think so many young kids love asking questions and the adults around them get fed up with the questions instead of engaging with them in the process of discovery.
Not to mention schools using grades, signed slips, and other extrinsic motivators to encourage conformity and obedience, all the while extinguishing any intrinsic motivation, like curiosity.
I'm sure the way schools look made a lot of sense in the time of industrialisation and the manual labour of the factory worker, but it's crazy we still shape students by that mould when it's so far removed from the creative pursuits we expect them to go on later in life.
“Signed slips”... our son turned 18 half-way through his senior year of high school. So I explained that he could now sign his own excuses for being tardy, and no actually explanation was required.
“Please excuse <name>, I am tardy.” <signature of name>”
If signed slips are ever needed with my children, I plan on doing what my parents did for me: teach the children to self-sign from day one. Their responsibility, their signature.
I didn't even grow up in this era and I keep buying stuff from eBay purely out of fascination for old ways of doing things. These names on all kinds of things I have horded - architectural templates, drafting machine, cutting mat, compass set, lettering templates, etc.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful story. Something tells me your career path wouldn’t have changed significantly if you had never touched a slide rule, though :)
Not in quite the same way, but I was inspired by watching Apollo 13 as a kid. I felt like the heroes were the engineers who could do the math and calculate the trajectories and work out the procedure for starting up the LM with low power. I was drawn to the engineering side of software by that. I keep an antique slide rule and some other old engineering instruments on my desk as a reminder of that inspiration.
I went through a very similar evolution, starting with slide rules, at about the same time. You don't mention middle school and high school -- I was very fortunate in having access to Wang and Monroe programmable calculators, and then a PDP-8M.
Still have a few slide rules, includingn Pickett and K&E.