Sometime in the late 1960s or early ‘70s when I was at East Lansing High School we learned how to use a slide ruler and—no joke—went on a field trip to see a computer.
When I was a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1974 I was one of only a handful of students who had a calculator in my introductory physics class. It was a Texas Instrument SR-10, a graduation gift from my parents that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Such calculating power! And it only cost a little over $100, about a quarter of what U of M then charged in-state students per semester. Continue reading
