Over at “Davos Newbies”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ Lance Knobel is writing about “the lure of the slide rule”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/2004/07/08#theLureOfTheSlideRule:
bq. “Those of us who love slide rules are by definition not Luddites. It’s the tactile nature of the technology that excites, rather than a revulsion against the technologies that replaced it. There were gains provided by electronic calculators. Our work, lives and society are being dramatically transformed - and I believe generally improved - through near-ubiquitous computing. But there are losses from the slide rule age that are more than nostalgia. It’s better to be a tool user than a tool manager.”
I too was one of the last generation at school not only to learn about this device but to use it on a daily basis. Lance touches (!) on the tactile nature of the tool yet this goes beyond pure pleasure - I don’t think it is too far-fetched to say that using a slide rule gives you a real _feel_ for numbers… After all how else can you easily demonstrate that to multiply two numbers you can add the logarithms? (yes, we used log tables too!).
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July 12th, 2004 at 9:55 pm
I’m particularly fond of the circular slide rule - no more needing to move the rule back and forth.
Another good tactile math tool is the abacus.
July 22nd, 2004 at 6:55 pm
I wonder if there’s an interesting analogy to be made with vinyl records. Once upon a time these were a storage and publishing medium for music. More recently, with the publishing and storage role gone to CD and MP3, they’ve established a niche as a user interface for DJs. It’s precisely the manipulation that they afford due to their size and shape that keeps them going.
It’s got to the stage where you can even hook up turntables to a Linux box and use an arbitrary record to scratch an MP3 file.
So why not a physical slide-rule-like interface to a spreadsheet or maths program? The slider could be generally mapped to a range of data or charts or variables. Occasionally, it would be used for something approaching it’s original purpose.