.... when you can remember what a slide rule was/is ...

When I was a kid I read an article about the local airplane company that had built one with an 18 ft long scale, and had actually pulled it out of mothballs for some sort of special project.

I thought it sounded pretty neat, once I figured out how they worked, so I decided to get myself one of them thar sticks.

They were so hard to find in my town then that I made my own - and used it for 4 or 5 years before I got to the "big city" and could buy a "real one." (They were mandatory for the Chemistry finals.)

About 15 years later the other airplane factory where I was working needed to modify the "weight and balance computer" for one of their airplanes, and the standard model was ... ... ... a "slide rule" with specialized scales on it.

It took about three months to find a manufacturer that would admit that they still had the machinery to make one. The half-dozen that we bought cost around $6,000 each; and when they got them done we had to sign a waiver promising that we would NEVER ORDER ANOTHER ONE before they agreed to ship them to us.

John