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Oughtred Society
Had you heard of it before? I was astonished to find out it’s for slide rule collectors. Mr. Troutbend is bowling in a tournament so I can’t wait for him to get home so I can ask him if he knew that word. I can’t remember if we got rid of his slide rule(s) when we moved in 2005. Seeing this, he’ll probably wish we’d kept it/them.
We graduated from college in the early 1970s and slide rules were still in use, but electronic calculators were starting to come out.
When I took a statistics class as a sophomore, there was a calculator lab - a room full of big desk calculators - that we could sign up for time to use in order to do our homework. Prior to that, there were some mechanical calculators that were electric-powered and worked like an abacus might in the hands of a skilled user, but they weren't something a person would own.
Computers at that time were talked to by means of punch cards and again we had to sign up for time to use the card punch machines to write Fortran programs. As an engineering major, Mr. Troutbend and his fraternity brothers at Triangle Fraternity - only geeks need apply - carried around big boxes of the punched cards that represented their programs, referred to as 'jobs.'
The jobs were turned in at a window to be run through the computer, and you received a printout that showed the results of your punching. Mr. Troutbend was very adept at spotting problems in other people's programs, and I can still hear his voice as he starts reading a printout: "What causes this?"
I remember seeing a lot of boys carrying slide rules in high school. I don't remember seeing any girls with them.
I never did figure out how to use them.
