I learned to use a slide rule in the 7th grade which was 1968. We also had a simple programmable HP lab calculator that was the size of a suitcase, had a display of a dozen or so nixie tubes and had something like 512 bytes of memory. We also had timesharing access to a GE 350 mainframe - through MECC I think - with one of those old 110 baud teletype units with the punch tape reader. I bought my first calculator, a TI Datamath, in 1973 for $100 that would add, subtract, multiply and divide. That got replaced with an HP-35 the next year when I headed off to UMD. I think it was on sale for $300 or so. Most of the freshmen class in physics were still using slide rules in '74 but when my youger brother started the next fall almost everyone had an HP or TI scientific calculator. I was in a biostat class a couple of weeks ago when one of the students wanted to know why the SAS command to read in data is called CARDS. Man I'm getting old :-) --rick Tom Penney wrote: >On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 12:33, Nate Carlson wrote: > > >>On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Samuel MacDonald wrote: >> >> >>>We didn't have any computers in the high school I went to. That was >>>1974-77 so that sort of explains it :) >>> >>> >>Really? You didn't have calculators back then? :) >> >> > >I remember my parents buying one of the first consumer "portable digital >calculators" for my oldest sister when she went to off to collage. It >was $150. It had add, subtract, multiply, divide and square root with an >8 digit readout. I couldn't play with it. It was too expencive. That was >mid 70's. > > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list