I used to have one of these...

[wafflycat]

Computers? Calculators?? Pah, you don't know you were even born.

I had to cope with one of these:

I still have my school slide rule!

 

[Fnaar]

I still have my school slide rule!

I actually never figured out what they were for. Except for working out sines and cosines. Or was it logarithms? Either way, I didn't understand. The only thing it was REALLY useful for was holding it up and then jerking it down quickly (steady on matron) so that the middle bit shot out and hit someone.

 

[beanzontoast]

I actually never figured out what they were for. Except for working out sines and cosines. Or was it logarithms? Either way, I didn't understand. The only thing it was REALLY useful for was holding it up and then jerking it down quickly (steady on matron) so that the middle bit shot out and hit someone.

Used mine mostly for multiplying and dividing. I was just heading into 6th form when calculators came into being.

Reading your post, the word 'mantissa' has just leapt into my mind for the first time in about 35 years, which I think had something to do with the floating point in logs(?)

 

[tyred]

loved this when I got one. Thought it was amazing when I got it. Nothing PC wise has come close to sitting listening to the buzzing noise and coloured screen when a game was loading

I had (still have actually) the later one with the built in tape deck

 

[Fnaar]

Reading your post, the word 'mantissa' has just leapt into my mind for the first time in about 35 years, which I think had something to do with the floating point in logs(?)

Floating logs? oo'er. Never heard of mantissa before, but here it is on wiki. I got as far as the word 'describe', and after that it might as well be written in Sanskrit

I also had one of these:

 

[beanzontoast]

I also had one of these:

Ahh - now that's for raising things to the power of x.







IGMC....

 

[NickM]

Hah! This talk of old computers is all dribble. When I left school I worked as an operator on a Ferranti Orion mainframe. Such an antique that I can't find a picture of it on the Interweb

It had valves in it, and occupied a whole room. It had a tiny fraction of the computing power of the HP Ipaq I have in my pocket.

 

[rich p]

Floating logs? oo'er. Never heard of mantissa before, but here it is on wiki. I got as far as the word 'describe', and after that it might as well be written in Sanskrit


I think that for a logarithm of 1.9834, the mantissa would be 0.9834, but that could be a load of cobblers!

 

[tyred]

It had valves in it, and occupied a whole room. It had a tiny fraction of the computing power of the HP Ipaq I have in my pocket.

Yeah but the Ipaq has no character

 

[Fnaar]

Hah! This talk of old computers is all dribble. When I left school I worked as an operator on a Ferranti Orion mainframe. Such an antique that I can't find a picture of it on the Interweb

It had valves in it, and occupied a whole room. It had a tiny fraction of the computing power of the HP Ipaq I have in my pocket.

You can get a brochure here... http://ferranti-orion.co.uk/

 

[NickM]

You can get a brochure here... http://ferranti-orion.co.uk/

Oooh - I can buy a new one? Will they take my Ipaq as trade-in?

 

[NickM]

But whatever has happened to computer operators? I presume that with modern desktop computers which don't have tape drives that the job has died out, like firemen on trains.

I'm extinct!

I knew there was something amiss...

 

[Browser]

Matchbox 'Cascade'

My parents were right, it was a pointless toy whicn you couldn't so anything with other than watch the steel balls go from one end to the other, but I must've had an auger fetish at age five as I used to like watching the balls get lifted up the tower. As I recall, the batteries used to go flat in about five minutes and my parents would never buy any more, miseries!

 

[02GF74]

Oooh - I can buy a new one? Will they take my Ipaq as trade-in?

not sure they make them anymore.

from memory, out there on the web are instructions and circuit diagrams to make a cpy from logic gates

 

[ComedyPilot]

OP - I never had one.