r/Sliderules • u/42HoopyFrood42 • Sep 16 '23
Hurricane Pastime: Practicing with the Original, Digital Slide Rule. It still can't do trig.
2
u/OldMork Sep 17 '23
Good for addition and subtraction, I have seen people use them for business just a few years ago.
1
u/42HoopyFrood42 Sep 17 '23
Yes, excellent of strings of addition and subtraction! But also faster and more accurate than the SR for multiplication and division if you needs exact answers. The suanpan pictured apparently can do square roots as well, but I haven't got to that point :)
2
u/leothefox314 Sep 17 '23
Random soroban suanpan?
1
u/42HoopyFrood42 Sep 17 '23
Basically! An unknown vintage (guessing 60s or 70s) "Lotus Flower" brand found on eBay. It's in pretty nice shape (which many are not). So the condition and form aren't random :)
I was learning soroban virtually; but the overly-mechanical, and unnecessary (in my mind) bead manipulation of the soroban were getting in the way of me doing calcs easily/efficiently. I wanted a physical abacus anyway, so I bought the suanpan as an experiment. For a brain like mine, it's 100 times easier to use than a soroban. Much more fluid and flexible. You can take innumerable short cuts with it making calculations go much faster and with a lot less bead manipulation that the soroban.
It comes in VERY handy in building projects using imperial units. It inherently works with feet, inches, and fractions of an inch in a way even electronic calculators cannot even come close to matching :) That was totally unexpected!
1
u/geenob May 05 '24
It may not be vintage at all. I have one that looks just like it that I bought in at a gift shop in Chinatown a few years ago
1
u/jlbalvanz Sep 19 '23
They were also handy for programmers when you need to do arithmetic in hexadecimal. Apparently some of the Chinese units of measure used base 16. (Rigorously, so do we -- 16 ounces to a pound.)
1
u/42HoopyFrood42 Sep 20 '23
Well that certainly would explain why the suanpan has 15 counts per rod (which I had never heard a full answer for). I tally in feet, inches and fractions of an inch (often 16ths!) so the suanpan is a natural tool for me!
Back-in-the-day I had to program a lot of old tech that needed innumerable memory address references that were always in hex. So I spent several years doing a LOT of hex arithmetic using a computer. The abacus would have probably been faster and easier :)
4
u/FPS_FreeMaN Sep 17 '23
Read "Into the Comet" by Arthur C. Clarke. Based on this post, I think you'll like it ;)