Illustrated Self-Guided Course On How To Use The Slide Rule
What a blast from the past.  I can draw a direct line from my encountering a slide rule to ending up as a programmer.  I owe my career to that device.<p>I was a nerdy 10 year old kid who liked doing arithmetic in 1970, but didn't know anything particularly advanced.  I convinced my parents to get me a slide rule as a Christmas present that year; a basic white Post model 1447 - I know that because I'm looking at it right now.  It's been in my desk drawer forever as I could never convince myself to throw it away, even though I've long since lost the sliding cursor.<p>Anyway, I got the slide rule, had fun with basic multiplication/division, but didn't understand what the S, T, and L scales on the back were for.  Sine/Tangent/Logarithm?  What are those?<p>Off to the library, where I picked up a Tutor-Text book [0] on trigonometry, discovered I'd better first learn some algebra, picked up another Tutor-Text book on that, and began a two-year tear teaching myself algebra to integral calculus.  Which meant I tested out of a couple years of math in high school, ran out of courses to take, and in my junior year was allowed to walk to the local college to take 2nd year Calc classes.<p>At that college, they started letting me play with the computers, both an IBM 5100 APL machine over one summer, and hands-on access to the IBM 11/30 clone minicomputer that was the main machine.  The math prof pointed me at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming", and that began my transition from pure mathematics to computer programming/science instead.  I even wrote a MIXAL assembler/MIX simulator for the minicomputer that the college ended up using to teach an assembly language course.<p>So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E!  And Tutor-Text as well.<p>[0]: <a href="https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show" rel="nofollow">https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show</a>