We began with slide rules. When I was at LSU the very first calculator came out by Texas Instruments. Ti10. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, square and square root. It cost $100 and was an unfair advantage in math class. What's a computer?:lol:. I found it and pulled it out of the closet !!! it's really called the SR10 It also had a 1/x function and could work in scientific notation because of the EE key (enter exponent) also could change signs (+/-) It was in a shoe box in a closet in my old room at my mother's house and guess what else was in the box...a ticket stub from the NCAA basketball finals in the Superdome when MJ led UNC beat Georgetown and Patrick Ewing !!!! only cost $7 in the terrace !!!
I was a freshman but went home to Mississippi for the holidays and watched on TV. I remember how Wyo. completely dominated the game until Smith came in. A Wyo. player's comment went something like 'we'd scouted LSU so well that we knew what hand they pissed with, and then they brought in this guy we'd never seen before.' The good ole days!
You're not much younger than me. I believe the TI 10 came out when I was a senior. It was a huge deal. Up until that time the business school used these humongous electric calculators that jumped all over the desk when crunching. LSU had one IBM 360 mainframe down by the ROTC building. You'd have to take your punch cards down there to run programs. Huge hassle.ldskule:
I took the Fortran course and used that big mainframe. I remember dropping a huge stack of those cards and now they were in random order ( the rubber band broke too). everyone around me on campus that day learned some new cursewords at that moment. When I was a senior, I took a programming course in Pascall...it was a format free language and it didn't matter what row or column things were in. I thought I was in heaven. But I still couldn't understand the error messages ("undeclared variable") and couldn't get anything to compile until 10 or 12 times. I dropped that class like a hot potato!! I think that's why I loved cooking and working in kitchens so much. I could actually get things right the very first time.
I tell my wife, who is a great cook, that I could never figure out how to get all parts of the meal done at the same time. It do take skill. ldskule:
Hey, I was a slide rule guy, myself. Still have it in its orange case. At USNA they were called a "slipstick," I took a bunch of engineering and advanced math courses with one. Never had a calculator in college, now, teaching 8th grade, all we use are calculators. Of course in business, never saw one, its all spreadsheets. I remember one of the profs had a TI-10. Back then, $100 was a lot of money. Who could afford one? I did not remember the cost, just that it was way, way, way more than I could "ever" afford. Oh yeah, I remember those damn IBM cards too. Nightmare! hwr
steve, tuck, hwr and other relics, I love telling youngsters (45 or younger) about taking fortran at LSU in mid-70s. One building, 20 punch card machines. You wait until a machine comes free (hours), type punch your (seemingly) 500 cards as people are breathing down your neck waiting for your machine, and hand your stack of cards to some goobers behind a counter. Then you go "somewhere" for more hours, occasionally going back to the building to check and see if your cards were "run". No, you don't have email or cell phones to tell you it's ready, you have to go there and check. Finally you find your batch of cards in the out bin with a printout attached by rubber band. YES! You open the printout and find that the 3rd card has a typo and the computer kicked it out. MF SOB!! So, you wait for a machine, fix that card, rinse repeat only to find (hours later) the 4th card had a typo. The above is NOT fictional. It actually happened. You kids curse when a web site takes 3 seconds to appear because you need to copy text into "your" report. I say this full of love: kiss my ass! On topic, I clearly remember Glenn Smith against Wyoming, he was a mudder on that sloppy field. I also had a LSU jersey, #13 for Mike Hillman, who was a left handed (like me) QB.
