On 2023-06-01 15:05, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I remember seeing the initial ad campaign. A big price drop from other calculators. But it only had 4 functions. I had been given a scientific calculator by then, if I remember correctly. Oddity: floating point but no scientific notation -- crazy.
Yep, it was a 4 banger. Fixed point at 2 digits. It also took a fair effort to press the keys, IIRC. A couple of years later, I bought a couple of their desktop calculators, from a surplus place in the states. SD Sales? Even though they were made in Toronto, I still had to pay duty to bring them across the border.
| BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high | school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later! | By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator.
<https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1214517>
Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction.
Well, what do you expect for $2? 😉 Anyway, I was just a kid starting high school at the time. Incidentally, there's a bit of a story about my first day in electricity class, which is what I bought that slide rule for. On the first day of class, the teacher was talking about resistance and how all conductors had it. I then asked "What about superconductors?". He'd never heard of them (this was Sept. 1967, when few people had). I knew about them, because I had read about them in an encyclopedia that I had at home. So, the next day, I brought in that volume to show him. IIRC, superconductivity was discovered by a German physicist in 1914, when he inserted lead wire in liquid helium. My grade 12 electronics teacher had a big, multi-scale slide rule, which could handle reactance (capacitance & inductance) directly.