...Anyway, I did go down a rabbit hole a while back studying the history of scientific calculators, especially programmables. HP's first RPN calculator was the desktop HP 9100A in 1968, which cost as much as a car, but for many scientific and engineering organizations that was mind-blowing because this thing that could perform many of the computation functions of a full-blown computer was now just cheap enough that you could contemplate putting one on an individual engineer's desk. And the prices came down *fast* from there.
Old computing devices fascinate me, including slide rules. I don't have any at the moment but I kind of want to get my hands on one, but I'm afraid it will lead to a collecting bug that will further clutter my house. Fortunately slide rules are fairly portable.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-02-27 12:04 am (UTC)Old computing devices fascinate me, including slide rules. I don't have any at the moment but I kind of want to get my hands on one, but I'm afraid it will lead to a collecting bug that will further clutter my house. Fortunately slide rules are fairly portable.