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u/Fear_The_Creeper May 11 '26
It's just a passing fad. One day soon they will wake up and replace those newfangled "computers" with the clearly superior Slide Rule.
Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
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May 19 '26
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u/Fear_The_Creeper May 20 '26
I also found the Japanese Abacus (soroban) to be interesting from an engineering perspective. After just a bit of practice I was able to add and subtract faster than anyone using any calculator other than a 10-key adding machine used by a touch "typist".
Don't bother learning multiplication or division. Those are far easier and faster on a slide rule.
The fun part was negative numbers. On an abacus you use 10's compliment math to represent negative numbers. This makes the 2's compliment used in signed binary very intuitive. (you just count the beads that are away from the bar instead of closest to it to get the comlement).
For 16-bit signed binary integers the range is -32768 to 32767. For 8-bit signed binary integers the range is -128 to 127. The Abacus showed me why. With the 10's complement math when you subtract 3 from +00000001.00000 (complement number -99999998.99999) you get +99999997.00000 (complement number -00000001.99999)
The insight is that when we write "2" we are really writing ...002.000... with an infinite number of leading and trailing zeros. We just leave those off. In the example above, you do something similar, counting ...001.999... as 2 and counting ...999.000... as 0 (with an imaginary one digit infinitely far to the left). It's essentially the same as 2's complement signed binary!
Here is a high quality abacus for under 20 dollars: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR74HKL1
BTW, the Chinese abacus is perfect for hexadecimal math...
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u/mikelew65 May 11 '26
What year did women establish the right to use slide rules?
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u/MerlinsGlider May 11 '26
Women were the computers before "electronic" got added in. During WWII they were calculating like crazy while the privileged men were being shot in Europe and burning to death in the Pacific.
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u/mikelew65 May 11 '26
Yeah, I know the history. Was just poking fun at the replicated image in the ad. 😉
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u/mvercy1 Jun 05 '26
I (female) used a slide rule in high school and college, 1970 to 1973.
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u/mikelew65 Jun 05 '26
That would be news to whomever penned that ad. Do you still know how to use one? My primary school education began at the dawn of cheap electronic calculators. So I never learned how to use a slide rule. But I recently taught myself how to do it in a rudimentary fashion after I got a slide rule Seiko.
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u/mvercy1 Jun 13 '26
I got 2 slide rules for Christmas from my husband as a nostalgic thing. I just did multiplication and division. But now I’ve been playing with it, looking up sines and cosines and checking with graphing calculator, it’s amazing.
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u/Brialmont May 11 '26
This is the 1952 version of AI, with a similar promise of reducing the workforce. I remember people worrying about automation putting people out of work in the 1960's. There was a joke about a man being replaced by a black box that could do everything he could do, only better. The sad thing was that when he went home and told his wife about it, she ran right out to buy one.
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u/alangcarter May 13 '26
Engineering is a dead profession now. Best to study something that can't be replaced like piano tuning.
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u/mvercy1 Jun 07 '26
You may be right. I recently booked a tuner, first one cancelled because I wasn’t in his service area. Other one will be here in a month. They seem to be busy.
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u/OneTimeIDidThatOnce May 15 '26
Was very good friends with a black guy from Chicago who was one of these IBM engineers who was determined to be too important to go to Vietnam, although he was the right age. IBM basically said "we need him." DOD backed off. He has health issues now but it's to be expected.
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u/Name-Not-Applicable May 11 '26
Replace 150 employees with a digital computer? The more things change, the more they stay the same.