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I still have the Odhner calculator, as seen on page 19 of that PDF, that my grandfather was still using at his SME in the eighties (he owned a little SME making
by TacticalCoder 3y ago
I still have the Odhner calculator, as seen on page 19 of that PDF, that my grandfather was still using at his SME in the eighties (he owned a little SME making tailor-made clothes)! I think that at some point in the fifties he bought a stock of desks, calculators, typewriters, etc., used, from another company. And then he kept using these old machines for decades.
As a teenager I'd go help for a few bucks: I'd use the typewriter to write letters plus actual "carbon copies" (literally putting two or three sheets of paper separated by a carbon sheet).
Never understood how that Odhner calculator worked but I still have it (and I had no idea it was from 1920: TIL)!
P.S: I also wrote my first program used "for real" back then: I wrote a program on my Commodore 64 that'd compute the discount for his clients (like, say, hotels) according to how many suits they'd buy. And I printed the results on a dot-matrix printer. This saved my grandpa lots of time!
- PopAlongKid 3y ago>literally putting two or three sheets of paper separated by a carbon sheet I had to chuckle at your use of "literally", as I too (and probably many others here) would never imagine that there was a figurative way to do this. I should add, carbon paper is not literally made out of carbon. Separately, I noticed the image of the Playboy Magazine cover used in the article. It was customary for them to always include the bunny logo somewhere as part of the image; in this case it is embossed on the leather case for the slide rule.
- dahart 3y agoWhy would use of literally imply there’s a figurative way to do it? Literally has been used for emphasis and even sometimes used (correctly) to mean figuratively, for literally hundreds of years. Language is fluid and fun, and words have multiple meanings. Always have, always will. Don’t fight it, enjoy it. https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439 https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439 https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoIts funny how "CC:" has survived into the digital age. I wonder how many 20-somethings or younger realize what it really means?!
- HideousKojima 3y agoHell I'm 35 and most of what I saw growing up were "carbonless" copy forms (the yellow and pink ones). Using actual carbon paper for copies seems to have started falling out of common use in the 80's if not earlier