And then, one dark day in 1972, with the advent of the pocket calculator, the slide rule went the way of the abacus. Why fiddle around with the arcane log scales and indexes required to use a ...

Before the smartphone, the laptop and the graphing calculator, there was the slide rule. It's a powerful mechanical computing device, often no larger than a 12-inch ruler, marked with numbers ...

We were required to buy a slide rule and instructed in its use. Later, my parents bought me one of the first handheld calculators as a high school graduation gift. It was nearly the size of a Kindle.

Learn More. by Chris Preimesberger The new HP-35, the world’s first handheld scientific calculator, virtually made the engineering slide rule obsolete. It was HP’s first product to contain ...

Slide rules had been the gold standard of manual calculators for 400 years, but they were blown out of the water by a battery-powered chunk of plastic with an electronic chip at its heart.

If you predate the pocket calculator, you may remember slide rules. But slide rules take a a little skill to use. There was a market for other devices that were simpler or, in some cases ...

By the 1970s, the slide rule changed over to an electronic calculator which was a pricy item. Today you can buy calculators at the dollar store. [JohnAudioTech] pulled out an old Radio Shack ...

Before the smartphone, the laptop and the pocket calculator, there was a powerful mechanical computer. Our new series, Tools of the Trade, begins... The Slide Rule: A Computing Device That Put A ...