[Elecraft] OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

[SteveL]

I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati.  He had the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.

A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) .  The letter went on to describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding engineer.  And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and corrected.

And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule?  Who could ever imagine a computer that could fit into one room?  (Paraphrasing a line from early in the Apollo 13 movie.)

Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator?
Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches?

We’ve come a long way!  I love the reminiscences…

Steve
aa8af


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> I scraped and saved my summertime active duty pay to buy a Bomar 901 four-function calculator in 1972 for $150, about $950 today.  Hewlett-Packard had introduced their milestone HP-35 scientific calculator that year for $400, about $2535 today.  Extremely few students could afford that.
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