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I still have my Jakar slide rule, used throughout my engineering degree 50 years ago. I am probably one of the last group to do so as calculators became cheap enough for the masses soon after.
I also have my mother's Unique slide rule that she used in WWII when she was a WREN bomb range marker. The cursor had long gone and one of the scales come loose (plastic on a base wooden base) but it was useful to take into exams as it had mathematical formulae printed on the reverse!

Bunch of namby pambies. These are what real people use.

Sorry, Alison, but you are way out of line. This is the real thing

I cannot see, however, where you put the batteries in...... and it looks as if someone has broken one of the RAMsticks.

I remember a Flt. Eng. who used one of those, but during the long night sectors the clacking kept us awake !

ExSp33db1rd wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 06, 2022 7:52 am

I remember a Flt. Eng. who used one of those, but during the long night sectors the clacking kept us awake !

Prob a good idea that one of you did keep awake, no?

Prob a good idea that one of you did keep awake, no?

Probably, none of this push a button before take-off and watch the auto pilot and GPS do the rest, we actually worked for our salary.

To prevent both nodding off, if necessary we would "assign" one to take a short nap whilst the other "monitored". Later, as the night sectors got longer and longer, like Singapore - London, we got "relief" crew and an official crew bunk.

I recall a Capt. called Hancock telling the Flt. Eng. to find a seat and take a quick break ( nap ? ) The Capt. occupied the Flt. Eng. seat and maintained the duty log. whilst the co-pilot looked after the aircraft - i.e. long, boring night flight with few Nav. or ATC demands. When the Flt. Eng. returned to his post he looked at the log entries, crossed the whole lot out and wrote "Hancocks Half Hour." ( TV Comedy of the time! )

When we built the Thames Barrage (end of the 1970s) we were prohibited from using computers for anything. Strictly pen and paper and slide rules for calcs and sextants for measuring distance.

I guess the beancounters were similarly limited. The 'budget' ballooned from £36M to £360M in the time it took to finish the bloody thing.

Are you implying that the escalation in cost was because of the restriction to 'simple' calculation methods?

The miscalculation was analogue in nature.

They forgot to include a bit of financial padding to pay off the Thames mafia. The Watermen operate the oldest trade union in Britain and have done so for at least two thousand years. They demanded a 'cut' of waaay more than 100% of the spend. The Dutch contractor for the seabed works had presumed that the ransom would be 50% of the total budget and their Head Office in Rotterdam refused to accept that it would be 1,000%. They'd never encountered that before, even in the Gulf and in West Africa. Being Dutch in a country which is mostly made of reclaimed land and is literally surrounded by sea defences, they had their own expert boat drivers and had no need for English ones.

The head honcho had moved his family to London for what was expected to be a five year job. When he refused the demand for 36 non-existent watermen to be hired at a dayrate of a thousand Pounds each (a lot of money in the 1970s), they kidnapped his daughter and sent him a message saying that if he called the police they would cut off her ears and for each successive day they would cut off a finger. He had no choice but to stump up the money. He simply passed the bill on to the GLC who were paying for the whole thing.

The reason why digital computers were banned was because the Client representative firm were "consulting engineers" who knew nothing whatsoever about hydrography and needed every single measurement and calculation to be written on squared paper, with each page to be signed and countersigned. Their top Partners were old fogeys who trained to be civil engineers in the days when a "computer" was a man who sat at a tall desk with a fountain pen and a stack of foolscap paper.

For me it was interesting. I was working month-on month-off on the TransMed pipeline project which was the most high tech pipelay in the world at the time. We had spiffing new HP9845s and 8" floppythings for post-processing. In the manned submarine we had a 9825 for the real-time nav and a 9810 for data collection on floppythings which really were floppy. On my month off I was working with lead-lines and a sextant and my Staedtler-Mars slide rule and 7-fig trig tables to calc horizontal resection and vertical subtense position fixing to decimetric accuracy and precision.

What 5 megabytes of computer data looked like in 1966
62,500 punched cards, taking four days to load!

Post #90 ......Mrs ExS was an early computer programmer and recalls the first computer that she worked on occupying the whole of one wall of the office, with only about 2 Gb. available data. Accordingly they only used the last two digits of any year to save space, but knew that this would cause a problem at the turn of the Century, i.e what eventually became know as the Y2K bug - remember that ? but they decided that "someone" would have worked out what to do about it by then, but had they ? in 1999 she could have made a fortune as the programmers who had written the original programmes were in demand to sort them out, but she declined, sadly, I reckon she could have made a few million $ at that time.

Talking of size, as an occasional crew Nav. in those days I recall the early, experimental, INS's being fitted to about half of the port side wall of the cargo compartment of a 707 freighter. On my first experience we fired it up just before start-up. and inserted the Lat. and Long of our position at Heathrow then waited the obligatory 30 mins for it to sort itself out before taxying to the threshold of runway 10L. I went back to check it just before rolling, and was amazed to see that it had recorded a movement of 1 mile West and 1/2 mile South - spot on ! Magic ! Ultimately, when the final control box was fitted on the flight deck, we had to manually insert the Lat. and Long. of every waypoint en route from Heathrow to wherever, and could only programme the first 10, so in flight we were constantly poking new digits into it.

Later we got 10 x 8 available positions, inserted as 10 A, 10 B, 10 C etc through to 10 H, i.e. 80 waypoints. IIRC on a flight from London to Singapore, which became possible, Changi Airport just happened to need around 82 waypoints, so that we could be playing around with the INS on the descent, re-programming the new available A block again, so, I would tell the co-pilot to start from London using the second batch of slots, ie. 1B, 2B etc. That meant that we would reach 10 H around Kuala Lumpur and have had plenty of time to re-programme the 1A, 1B, 1C lot as far as Changi. Present crews, who just let the GPS do it all, have no idea.

and could only programme the first 10, so in flight we were constantly poking new digits into it.

Fret not. We were still doing that in Britain's Favourite Airline in 2001 on the 737 fleet.

Thanks, but you surprise me !

Apologies for repeating some of what I posted 18 months ago ! Memory ?