Steve writes:

> We had statewide competitions in math in high school, including in slide
>  rule. I routinely smoked everyone in our school, then got smoked even more
>  badly by the kids from Andrews. It was just a little town, but there was
>  something in the water down there: they came to the regional competitions
>  and blew everyone else into shivering piles of debris.

This is one of those threads where one-upsmanship rapidly becomes the beast.
Nonetheless, I took my slide-rule out of my desk drawer and took a couple of
pictures of it just now. Those pictures are on the web at:

     http://aics-research.com/sliderule.html

I bought this slide rule in either 1959 or 1960, used. As I remember I paid
only $100 for it. If it had been new, because it was the best K+E, it would
have cost me twice that much.

I used this slide rule virtually continuously from 1960 to 1991, until the
time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the end of the Cold War, our
engineering contracts with Army Research Labs came to an abrupt end. Those
contracts represented the last of the hardware engineering work that we did
-- and our transition to a software-only organization. As you can see in the
images, there are all sorts of burn marks in the slide rule from soldering
accidents during its 30 years of use.

If you need a high-speed calculator for engineering uses (where three
significant figures is close enough for government work), a slide rule still
remains hard to beat.

Wirt Atmar