Re: Pocket Calculator

Published: 2022-10-08 11:06

evenfire likes calculators

And so do I.

In high school I had a math teacher, Mr Anderson, who no one liked. He looked like he was right out of IBM or NASA wearing dress slacks, a white button down short sleeve shirt and a pocket protector. He had been a math teacher for so long he actually taught my dad. While most people hated his class, he was one of the reasons I love math and spent half my time in college in math classes.

One day while going through stuff in storage I came upon thin grey plastic container with a Dupont logo on it. When I opened it I found this strange piece of wood with a piece that slid in the middle. On the back it said "Dupont Slide Rule." So I loaded up my copy of Microsoft Encarta and learned about what a slide rule was and how to use it. I tossed it in my backpack and thought Mr Anderson would find it interesting. Unfortunately, Mr Anderson was out of town that week for Teachers Convention.

The next week when we got back to class Mr. Anderson was running a normal class. At one point he would put problems up on the board and ask everyone to solve it to see who would get the correct solution the quickest. Normally you get a point added to your overall grade but on the last problem he gave us a fairly complex problem and said whoever solved this the fastest would win a new calculator. He had won a new HP 38G at the convention, a calculator he already had so he was giving this one away. He wrote the problem on the board and right away I saw the concept he was trying to get us to work with, something I had read ahead on. The problem was a piece of cake.

That is when I remembered I had the slide rule in my bag. I pulled it out, took it out of the case and Mr Anderson saw it, laughed and told everyone to put down their pencils. He took the rule, showed it to the class. Explained that back in the day before calculators he actually taught classes where students used these. He then asked me if I knew how to use it. I said yes. He said, "Show us. Go up to the board and solve the problem." So I did.

Ended up taking the 38G on to college with me. Pretty much everyone else had TI calculators. A few people looked at it, thought it was odd that there even existed something besides TI-83/84/85 as that was the standard. That calculator got me through all my math and science courses, never cost me a dime.

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-10-08

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