32S II in HS......geez. I was a senior engineer for a couple of decades then. Making
me feel old, Ian.
Don't ever run down slide rules. We got to the moon with slide rules. At that point computers were
just silly, limited toys, pretty much, unless they took up a few rooms. Slide rules were it until about
for portable computation 1973 when the HP35 came out, quickly followed by the HP45. My parents got
me the HP45 for a college graduation present, and it cost over $400, and for comparison, a new VW Bug was
$1999. So, 20% the cost of a low priced car, perhaps $4000 in today's money.
I took my first computer programming course in 1967 when I was in HS. We had a very forward thinking
algebra and trig teacher in the rural town in central Fla, and he arranged for a school bus to take
students interested over to the Univ of Fla on Wed nights after school to take a course in computer
programming. We had a blast, and my future bride, then just a girl I knew in class, went too, because her Dad
ran the computer at the university.
It wasn't until '69 that I went to the university full time, and took the real course, which was much
easier, of course, after having already done it once. I was on the cusp of computer development
my whole career, starting in HS.
If somebody could fix the intermittent zero key on my HP45, it would still work, at least the last I checked, about
15 years back.
Bill