Scientific Analysis on the Pocket Calculator
Smith
1975
We have had other calculator books from the old days. Most of them, like this one and this one seemed to be pitching the same joke of spelling some clever words aimed at the junior high school mentality. This particular example is aimed at the science/engineering crowd. From what I can tell, it is actually pretty detailed. It is aimed at those who were of the pencil and paper/slide rule crowd that did higher level mathematics. I consulted with my mathematician son and engineer husband on this book. Husband said he hadn’t thought “about this crap since grad school.” Mathematician son commented that it was kind of interesting how they broke down how to work some seriously juicy problems using the calculator.
It is kind of an interesting relic of olden times.
Mary
I am 46 and don’t know what a slide rule looks like.
Oh, so THAT’S why the “EE” key is called that.
FWIW, the function they label “CHS” has been uniformly marked +/- since the 1990s or earlier.
Super useful back then — I might have even glanced at this or a similar one a few years later.
Redundant now that our calculators and computers can do the problems without us breaking them down into smaller parts.
I gave up on RPN after college, too.
My father and my current manager (different people) use(d) RPN because no one else understood it, so their calculators never got stoln from their desks.
The title sounds familiar; I seem to recall reading this book back in the day. I probably borrowed it from my university library to use with my HP-45 calculator (which cost me a months salary from my summer job).
This one has a clever spelling joke too — look at the display upside down!
Pretty sure this was in my college library.
I totally would have missed that if you hadn’t pointed it out!
The graphical designer won 1975 and you won 2021.