Thus it was written in the epistle of Olav Kappert,
>
> I'm not old enough to go back to the age of the abacus; how about the slide
> ruler ?

That's "slide rule" :-)

> Do anyone have one ?

Yup.

> Better yet, does anyone still remember how to use it and would you be willing
> to teach your children its functionality ?

Yup.  I finished up my Electrical Engineering degree in December of 1993 (back
in the dark ages ;-) and while I did actually use a calculator some, I did the
majority of the calculating I needed to do to get through Engineering school
on a slide rule, to prove that it could still be done :-).  I expect that there
are those on this list who can make better use of a slipstick than I, but I'm
here to tell you that if the slide rule is dead, it's only recently so ;-).

Ted "old fogey" Ashton
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
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Mathematicians have long since regarded it as demeaning to work on problems
related to elementary geometry in two or three dimensions, in spite of the
fact that it it precisely this sort of mathematics which is of practical
value.
                        -- Grunbaum, Branko (1926 - ), and Shephard, G. C. (?)
          ==========================================================
         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted