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That IBM ad at the end is priceless on so many levels. (What did that massive computer do? How many female engineers do you count... etc,) Thanks for the art

That IBM ad at the end is priceless on so many levels. (What did that massive computer do? How many female engineers do you count... etc,) Thanks for the article. My grandfather was an accountant who preferred the slide rule to a calculator. I grew up with slide rules around me, and never could understand the logic. Another tool lost in the past generation is the Abacus (here is a great story with Feynman[1]) and I would love more info as to how those compared in logic or use, if anyone can shed insight. [1]: https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

sbradford26 8y ago
I have some of the same experiences. Every older engineer would say "When I was in school we used slide rules" but no one would ever explain how they worked. This article was great for finally clearing that up for me.
- perilunar 8y ago
  This surprises me. I went to school after electronic calculators replaced slide rules (and books of log and trig tables), but we still learned how logarithms worked and that they were the principle behind slide rules.
  - sbradford26 8y ago
    I graduated from college in 2016. We definitely covered logarithms but nobody really tied it back to slide rules. It definitely is a shame because understanding how problems were solved before can provide a lot of insight.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    We used log and trig tables in the 90s (UK) at a time when programmable graphing calculators were widely available.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    We learned about logarithms as well in the 2000s, but they never mentioned slide rules. Just lots of tables and charts to get a feel for it.
jypepin 8y ago
You can find videos of abacus competitions on youtube, and it's mind blowing how fast they go!
dreamcompiler 8y ago
> My grandfather was an accountant who preferred the slide rule to a calculator. This is hard for me to understand. Slide rules are inherently imprecise, in the same way floating point calculations are imprecise but much moreso. I'd expect an accountant to prefer integer (fixed point) math for the same reason banks do now.
- lisper 8y ago
  > Slide rules are inherently imprecise And not particularly good for addition.
  - Someone 8y ago
    Depends on the scales used. With linear scales, they do addition. With logarithmic ones, multiplication.
    - lisper 8y ago
      Sure, in principle. Have you ever seen an actual slide rule with linear scales?
      - zeveb 8y ago
        Mine had them. I don't think that I'd prefer it for accounting work, though.
        lisper 8y ago
        > Mine had them. I doubt that very much. Do you have a photograph? I used to collect slide rules. I have never seen one with a linear scale, and I can't find any evidence on the web that any such slide rule was ever manufactured. So if you can provide evidence that you possessed such a slide rule, that would be of significant historical interest.
        kens 8y ago
lisper 8y ago
> How many female engineers do you count Or non-white ones.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  The _Hidden Figures_ reminder there that women and people of color were job titled "computers" for a long time in the English language. The term for female/PoC programmers/mathematicians/engineers became the name of the machine built to replace them. It's a fact that feels increasingly strange with distance/hindsight, or at least it should to folks with a heart. (Just finished Mary Robinette Kowal's excellent "Lady Astronaut" books, and they are a fascinating retro-history of a timeline that fought to get to Mars faster than ours, and an interesting part of that success was getting more Computers in space, but by that it was meant women and people of color that could use a slide rule and do important math quickly in a crisis.)
  - gowld 8y ago
    you are conflating history with sexism/racism, though they overlap. "Computer" was essentially a "technician" who performed calculations, as today you'd have a technician to install parts in your machines or do other mechanistic tasks in an operation. It's not so unusual for a word that refers to a human job eventually becomes the name for the machine that replaces that job: dishwasher, messenger, agent. "computer" happens to be the job that is so easy to mechanise cheaply that the human job was made quickly obsolete once the opportunity arose. The term "Computer" long predated mechanical computers, by centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer The earliest "computer" jobs tended to exclude women due to sexism. This photo shows an example of a human computer team that is mostly men (but may have a higher proportion of women than other technical teams in the larger organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#/media/File:NASA_human_computers_-_Mary_Jackson_on_far_right_-_Pressure_Tunnel_staff_taken_in_1950s.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#/media/File:NAS... You're more likely to find women and PoC in "computer roles" than in scientist/engineer roles because they tended to be shut out from higher-level roles they may have been qualified for, leading to an oversupply of their demographic at the lower levels. And those overqualified women/PoC have more notable stories than the non-overqualified women and men in those roles.
kens 8y ago
> What did that massive computer do? I believe it's an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. This box was programmed with a plugboard and did BCD addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It was built from 1100 vacuum tubes. It wasn't a computer in the modern sense. It read data from a card (the box in front is the card reader), ran through up to 60 steps of calculation, and then punched the result onto the same card, at the rate of 100 cards per minute. This system was introduced in 1948 and rented for $645 a month (about $5500 in current dollars). More info: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/604.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/604.html
walshemj 8y ago
Actually back then the "girls" where the computers imagine typing pool that did maths calculations Los Alamos had a large number to do nuke calculations.

sbradford26 8y ago

I have some of the same experiences. Every older engineer would say "When I was in school we used slide rules" but no one would ever explain how they worked. This article was great for finally clearing that up for me.

perilunar 8y ago
This surprises me. I went to school after electronic calculators replaced slide rules (and books of log and trig tables), but we still learned how logarithms worked and that they were the principle behind slide rules.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  I graduated from college in 2016. We definitely covered logarithms but nobody really tied it back to slide rules. It definitely is a shame because understanding how problems were solved before can provide a lot of insight.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  We used log and trig tables in the 90s (UK) at a time when programmable graphing calculators were widely available.
- true_religion 8y ago
  We learned about logarithms as well in the 2000s, but they never mentioned slide rules. Just lots of tables and charts to get a feel for it.

jypepin 8y ago

You can find videos of abacus competitions on youtube, and it's mind blowing how fast they go!

dreamcompiler 8y ago

> My grandfather was an accountant who preferred the slide rule to a calculator. This is hard for me to understand. Slide rules are inherently imprecise, in the same way floating point calculations are imprecise but much moreso. I'd expect an accountant to prefer integer (fixed point) math for the same reason banks do now.

lisper 8y ago
> Slide rules are inherently imprecise And not particularly good for addition.
- Someone 8y ago
  Depends on the scales used. With linear scales, they do addition. With logarithmic ones, multiplication.
  - lisper 8y ago
    Sure, in principle. Have you ever seen an actual slide rule with linear scales?
    - zeveb 8y ago
      Mine had them. I don't think that I'd prefer it for accounting work, though.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > Mine had them. I doubt that very much. Do you have a photograph? I used to collect slide rules. I have never seen one with a linear scale, and I can't find any evidence on the web that any such slide rule was ever manufactured. So if you can provide evidence that you possessed such a slide rule, that would be of significant historical interest.
        kens 8y ago

lisper 8y ago

> How many female engineers do you count Or non-white ones.

WorldMaker 8y ago
The _Hidden Figures_ reminder there that women and people of color were job titled "computers" for a long time in the English language. The term for female/PoC programmers/mathematicians/engineers became the name of the machine built to replace them. It's a fact that feels increasingly strange with distance/hindsight, or at least it should to folks with a heart. (Just finished Mary Robinette Kowal's excellent "Lady Astronaut" books, and they are a fascinating retro-history of a timeline that fought to get to Mars faster than ours, and an interesting part of that success was getting more Computers in space, but by that it was meant women and people of color that could use a slide rule and do important math quickly in a crisis.)
- gowld 8y ago
  you are conflating history with sexism/racism, though they overlap. "Computer" was essentially a "technician" who performed calculations, as today you'd have a technician to install parts in your machines or do other mechanistic tasks in an operation. It's not so unusual for a word that refers to a human job eventually becomes the name for the machine that replaces that job: dishwasher, messenger, agent. "computer" happens to be the job that is so easy to mechanise cheaply that the human job was made quickly obsolete once the opportunity arose. The term "Computer" long predated mechanical computers, by centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer The earliest "computer" jobs tended to exclude women due to sexism. This photo shows an example of a human computer team that is mostly men (but may have a higher proportion of women than other technical teams in the larger organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#/media/File:NASA_human_computers_-_Mary_Jackson_on_far_right_-_Pressure_Tunnel_staff_taken_in_1950s.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#/media/File:NAS... You're more likely to find women and PoC in "computer roles" than in scientist/engineer roles because they tended to be shut out from higher-level roles they may have been qualified for, leading to an oversupply of their demographic at the lower levels. And those overqualified women/PoC have more notable stories than the non-overqualified women and men in those roles.

kens 8y ago

> What did that massive computer do? I believe it's an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. This box was programmed with a plugboard and did BCD addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It was built from 1100 vacuum tubes. It wasn't a computer in the modern sense. It read data from a card (the box in front is the card reader), ran through up to 60 steps of calculation, and then punched the result onto the same card, at the rate of 100 cards per minute. This system was introduced in 1948 and rented for $645 a month (about $5500 in current dollars). More info: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/604.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/604.html

walshemj 8y ago

Actually back then the "girls" where the computers imagine typing pool that did maths calculations Los Alamos had a large number to do nuke calculations.