Jeez, takes me back. My dad, a Lutheran Minister, taught me to use it when I was about 10. About the time I got my first computer and had subscription to "Chemistry" magazine. I LOVED the slide rule. I just figured stuff out in order to have fun w/ it. He bought me a really nice one because I loved it so much. Heck that was 40 years ago.

The computer, and Basic language.

That's as great a tool as the slide rule. In fact I'm getting ready to Google search and download a basic interpreter for my new laptop. I've got a statistics problem I'm working on that would best be done by repetitive calculations. The calculation is determining the most likely outcome of a form of solitaire card game. You shuffle the cards hold the deck in your hand and repetitively take the back card off the deck and bring it face up on the front of the deck. For the first 3 cards you just pile them up, then on the 4th and every card afterwords if the suit or the number matches the 4th card down in the face up pile you remove some cards, all 4 if the number matches, the middle 2 if the suit matches. With the matching suit removal you then have a possible next 4th card match. If not you continue with the flipping the back card till you've run through the deck. Normally you end up with about a dozen cards at the end, the best I've done is 2 cards, the worst about 30. It an interesting statistics problem to figure out the most likely outcome. I like to keep my mind active with problems like this, but also like to use the computer when possible. I'm still lazy, that's a quality of a good engineer.....

I know other languages might be more powerful than Basic, but Basic gets the job done, it's easy and doesn't take up much memory. I have learned and can work in Fortan, Pascal, machine language and many other languages, but I find I always come back to Basic if it can solve the problem.

I should have Basic on the computer when I go offshore anyway, you never know what navigation problem it might help me solve.

BASIC works well for most everything, PASCAL is dead as far as I know, and FORTRAN is still great for very complex calculations. I never knew the age of punch cards, but learned to read them once from an old IBM book. I bought a slide rule at a Flea Market and practiced with it for a while. It is a neat thing. I have read that Feynman had some tricks using logarithms to multiply numbers.

My data and programs for my PhD (that I never finished) is on punched paper tape. I figured I could read it by hand if I had too. It was heading out of fashion when I used it but I figured it was the safest from of storage. There was no real standard of magnetic storage, it would change ever year or two, and still does. Also magnetic media is not permanent. Paper tape isn't either, but with proper care paper tape could easily last hundreds of years, and if I really was serious I could have bought plastic tape.

In order to read the paper tape I bought a portable teletype machine, it interfaces to a RS232, still standard serial port on any computer. The programs are stored in ASCII format to be readable and usable with new FORTRAN compilers.

I just never needed the PhD so the stuff is still there waiting. I feel bad because I discovered a simplification of the mathematics to analyze light scattering data from multiple particles and never published it. I choose to sit on it in case I needed the degree sometime. I'll have to publish it sometime. What I found was an integral transformation that applied to work another researcher had done. Nobody has really done any work on this since the late 50's. In the 80's we had a lot of grain dust explosions and the government pumped a lot of money into the problem, it was discovered that secondary explosions from dust laying around and stirred up by the first small explosion did all the major damage. Clean up the elevators, and the problem goes away, and so does the research funding. So I got busy solving other problems, like building bridges out of fiberglass.