Have you ever used one of these? Tools from the past.

I finished high school in Australia in 1970. We were not allowed to use calculators, but in the engineering type classes we were taught to use slide rules and were expected to use them in exams. By the way many pilots still use the E6b or cr 6 flight computers, the "whiz wheel". These are actually circular slide rules with special reference points marked on them as an aid to use. They are used to calculate time and distance, fuel required as well as conversions like weight of fuel or oil, miles to nautical miles or kilometers, ect. They are very fast to use, require no power and can be used with one hand. So the slide rule still lives on in the modern world!

Do folks here remember the giant slide rules hanging in classrooms? They were used for teaching and often found in math and science classrooms. I think it would be cool having one of those hanging in my den.

Some people easily discard this object as "obsolete" but they should remember that it are exactly these "calculators" that made space traveling possible, as well as sending probes into deep space and keeping the International Space Station in orbit. And then there are the thousands of ways in which they have contributed to the modern ages. No, not obsolete but indeed important, extremely important.

Old joke. Ask an engineer what's 2x2, he whips out his slide rule and says 3.9

I started college fall term of 1972. One of my first classes was slide rule use. I had a Post Versalog II which I had bought at my HS store. My professor checked our work with a four-function calculator he built from a kit advertised in the back of Popular Electronics magazine. My first slide rule was 6" Sterling 587 just like yours. I bought it in the fifth grade and learned how to use it on my own, with only the supplied instruction sheet. I still have that slide rule.

I worked in IT until I was 68. Almost all of the other 18 or so members of the staff were half my age or less. Once I mentioned a slide rule in a meeting. No one knew what it was. They called me grandpa and would often ask for advice, but I often had trouble translating what I was telling them to their experience. Time moves on to new roads and the old ones fall to dust.

I graduated High School in 79. In the Navy in electronics school, we used scientific calculators. Which I had never seen before. But all our electronic calculations were done on these. Later, when I entered the Army (89), I was branched into Field Artillery. In Artillery school, we used slide rules for everything when computing data for the guns/howitzers. It was months of training in what was then called "manual gunnery" I am glad we did, in the last 4 weeks of Artillery school we learned computers for gunfire control. But the slide rules gave us a firm foundation in the basics of controlling the fire of large guns before we went on to computers.

Anyone else remember the 5’ or 6’ long slide rules that the teachers would use? They’d hang from hooks over the chalkboard…

I had a slide rule way back when I first started university. I couldn't do much with it, and for me showing it simply meant I was smart. Looking back at that time and reflecting on the beginning of my teaching career in the late 70s to mid 80s, the Rubic's cube amongst students took on the same feel: to be seen as smart everyone had to have one dangling from their clothing showing it had been solved. A student of mine that occasionally caused me problems had one that was always in the solved position. On one such problematic time I asked to see it and proceeded to scramble it. The look of panic on that student's face was amazing. Later in the day I noticed the cube was back in the solved position, and I learned that most students were just pulling off the little cubes and sticking them back in the solved position.

When I was in school math was not the strongest subject. T may teacher wanted the answer out to four decimal places. He said if you use a slide rule you only need three places. I learned that slide rule fast. It helped me later when I had to use an E6B slide calculator.

What I like about the Slide rule is that one needs to mentally keep track of the decimal place unlike the calculator. This helps one to concentrate and sharpen one's mind.

I was invited to my old alma mater to give a guest lecture. On my way to the room where I was to speak, I passed a display case containing various "antique" items relevant to the department's activities and there was a slide rule very similar to the one I had used so long ago. Time flies.

I'm 71 and still have 2 slide rules somewhere. My kids will think they're mysterious when I pass and they have to clear out my stuff. My first calculator was a Rockwell LED display and it was fantastic.

Dad was an engineer and bought me my first slide rule when I was 13 in 1961. I bought a new one in 1965 when I started training as an electronics tech. I still have Dad’s Hemmi bamboo slide rule, in its leather case.

Thanks for the nostalgia! Thru HS (1965 grad), slide was virtually grafted to my hands. Plastic. Now lemmee throw a curveball--- if you wanted to be a real geek, you got yourself a CIRCULAR badboy. So you were able to extract more accuracy because it was 3.14 times as long as a straight one having a length equal to the circle's diameter. My first experience with electronic calculator was late 60s when I was on a job and they gave me a Friden 8-cell (?) desktop model.

Thanks for refreshing memories of my days in technical college mid 60’s working metric and imperial calculations in slide

No batteries required. I was taught how to use a slip stick in college. I still have it...somewhere. After graduating I put the slip stick away and never looked back. Great video thumbs up.

In high school (1972-1973) I had a Pickett aluminum slide rule. When I started college in 1974 my parents bought me the Texas Instrument SR-11 electronic slide rule. It had the square root function key, which was a big deal at the time. The calculator cost my parents $168 which was very expensive 50 years ago. I still have the slide rule and calculator.

After high school, in the mid 80s and early 90s, I worked at my Grandfather’s machine shop during the summers. Calculators were available and affordable but my Grandfather insisted that his machines knew how to use a slide rule. He taught me and I still remember how to use it. The slide rule that he gave me is proudly displayed in a shadow box and hanging on my wall. I used a slide rule, in the early 2000s, to take my ham radio test using a slide rule instead of a calculator.

I started college in 1965. There were no hand held calculators for any price then. I paid $36 for a 12" slide rule from the college book store. I remember that amount because it was a lot of money for me back then. By 1970 when I was in the army we had a Friden calculator that had a 4 " video screen and it had a 4 line memory and I think it was accurate to about 10 digits. It cost several thousand dollars. 5 years later I bought a digital watch with led read-out for $10 bucks. A good TI calculator was $20 bucks, they still are. God bless calculators. They are now $1 buck at the dollar store.