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

[John Saxon]

 I have greatly enjoyed the memory fest here.  Wasn't going to join in, but, Steve, your email really hit close to home.  I replied to Steve, intended for whole group.

Took 'Mechanical Drawing' in Jr. high, loved it.  Also had drawing classes (course also included slide rule) first semester of college.

I was a co-op student in EE and worked for NASA 1962-1967.  I was placed in a software group, kinda out of my degree, but I liked it and spent my career as a Software Engineer (in the day we were called 'programmers.')
I was greatly blessed to be working at NASA at the beginning of operations in Houston.  The first computer I worked on was an IBM 7094, 32K of 36 bit words, 2 microsecond cycle time, mag tape OS, no disk.  We were located in what had been the PBS TV studio on the University of Houston campus, reworked to be a computer center - the space center (MSC) was under construction.  Languages were FORTRAN II, assembly (FAP) and eventually FORTRAN IV and assembly.  Punch cards of course.
Slide rules indeed!  However, we also had a Friden mechanical calculator which could do square roots!!

Ham rig at the time was a homebrew 6AU6-6146 from a QST article and Hallicrafters S-19R with Heathkit Q multiplier, dipole on 40m cw.
As you, Steve, indicated I could not afford the HP 'digital slide rule' -- bought the TI version about a year later for a cost 1/2 of the HP, used it for years.  Still have my K&E DECI-LON (and a B-29  'Load Adjuster' slide rule from WWII).
I remember all the items you mentioned.
Finally (at last) I often tell younger folks (I am 77) that they have orders of magnitude more power in their cell phones than we had in our gigantic computers -- BUT -- we put men on the moon with 'em.
Sorry for the wide bandwidth,73,John  K5ENQ



    On Monday, April 26, 2021, 10:36:33 AM CDT, SteveL <lawresh at woh.rr.com> wrote:  
 
 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
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