On 2023-06-01 15:05, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I remember seeing the initial ad campaign. A big price drop from other
calculators. But it only had 4 functions. I had been given a scientific
calculator by then, if I remember correctly. Oddity: floating point but
no scientific notation -- crazy.
Yep, it was a 4 banger. Fixed point at 2 digits. It also took a fair
effort to press the keys, IIRC. A couple of years later, I bought a
couple of their desktop calculators, from a surplus place in the
states. SD Sales? Even though they were made in Toronto, I still had
to pay duty to bring them across the border.
| BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high
| school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later!
| By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator.
<https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1214517>
Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules
because they were jerky to operate: stiction.
Well, what do you expect for $2? 😉
Anyway, I was just a kid starting high school at the time. Incidentally,
there's a bit of a story about my first day in electricity class, which
is what I bought that slide rule for. On the first day of class, the
teacher was talking about resistance and how all conductors had it. I
then asked "What about superconductors?". He'd never heard of them
(this was Sept. 1967, when few people had). I knew about them, because
I had read about them in an encyclopedia that I had at home. So, the
next day, I brought in that volume to show him. IIRC, superconductivity
was discovered by a German physicist in 1914, when he inserted lead wire
in liquid helium.
My grade 12 electronics teacher had a big, multi-scale slide rule, which
could handle reactance (capacitance & inductance) directly.
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