The protractor and the Bunsen burner. Playing the recorder in music class. Drawing arcs and circles with a compass in geometry. These tools of the education trade become part of our lives for a ...

My high school physics teacher spent a week teaching students how to use a slide rule. I asked him, "why can't we just use calculators?" At the time a slide rule was about $2, and a calculator was ...

Soon will come a day when you’ll meet a brilliant conversationalist at a party and have no idea that you’re talking to an implanted computer chip. Whenever you hear a person wishing for ice and snow, ...

Most people have heard of or seen slide rules, with older generations likely having used these devices in school and at their jobs. As purely analog computers these ingenious devices use precomputed ...