Old-style Calculators

This is something you don't see anymore.

Back when I was a kid, I saw this rectangular thing on Dad's table. It had a slideable strip in the middle and a transparent sliding window with a thin line down the middle. There were numbers all over it that, at first, made me think it was a fancy ruler but the number spacing was all wrong. It couldn't be a ruler so what was it? Ever the curious kid with a fascination for technical stuff, I asked Dad what it was (after experimenting with it for awhile).

He called it a slide rule.

So, it's a ruler without the extra "r", I thought. So, how does it measure things.

He said, "You don't measure with it. It helps me calculate things, like with multiplication."

I guess my eyes went wide. My first thought was, "This thing can help me with my math?"

"How does it work?" I asked him.

He asked me to give him two numbers to multiply. I decided on something simple. I wanted a test that I knew the answer to so that I'd know if the thing really does what Dad said it could do.

"Two times three." 

He starts demonstrating. "You move the slider bar until the '2' is here, then you move the sliding window until this marker is on the '3.' Then you can see that the answer is here, it's '6'."

I tried a few other numbers and the thing gave the correct answer every time. Wow! That's neat!

He also had a circular one that worked in much the same way.

Fast forward about five years or so. I was in high school. I noticed that the third or fourth year students were holding slide rules. It was a sort of status thing. If you held one in your hands, you were almost an engineer. There was a giant slide rule in one of the laboratories (maybe ten feet long) that was used to train the students on how to use them. I couldn't wait to get to their level so I can have my own slide rule.

It wasn't meant to be. The calculator began to appear around 1975 or so and it promised to be be vastly better than the slide rule. The slide rule ceased to be part of the curriculum and this status symbol disappeared almost instantly. 

Calculators were better. I bought a few of them during high school until I bought a programmable one when I was in fourth year. It's what got me started in programming.

The TI-57 programmable calculator

Occasionally, however, I see a picture of a slide rule and the memory of my first encounter with it comes back. Sometimes I'd think of buying one just for the heck of it. Maybe something to impress my grandchildren with, just as I was.

New Book My Facebook Notes is Out

My latest book, My Facebook Notes, is finally published and is available at Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I expect it to appear soon in other online bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. So, what's it about?

When I first joined Facebook back in 2009, I immediately noticed the Notes feature. My friends were using it to post inspirational articles but I wanted to be different. I decided to use it to write about my experiences about my travels. Those series of posts later became my first book, Funny Stories from My Travels (now retitled, Travel Mashups and Mishaps).

Then, I began writing smaller stories, funny anecdotes, inspirational notes, and various other things. I had dozens of those notes and might have gone on and on if not for a change in Facebook.

Around September 2020, Facebook announced that they were discontinuing the Notes feature. People could no longer make new notes but the old notes would still be available for viewing.

I was saddened by the loss of an outlet for my creative juices. I immediately began copying the notes to MS Word files and kept them in my computer in case Facebook decided to delete them. One day, a little more than two years later, I got the idea to compile these notes and put them into a book. That's how My Facebook Notes came to be.

I pasted them into a single Word file and arranged them as to topics. There were my speeches, my tips on public speaking, memories, tips on writing and publishing books, and other notes and stories. There are 150 of those notes in the book.

After the book was finished, I uploaded them to Smashwords and soon got the message that it had been accepted and was now being distributed to other ebook distributors.

I chose the title My Facebook Notes because, first of all, it is a compilation of my Facebook Notes. Second, I thought it was unique, that other people might not think of sharing their own notes. I later learned, I was wrong.

While searching for the book by Googling it, I discovered that there were other books with the same title and, they too, were about notes that the authors converted into books. It was not an original idea after all.

No worries though. Titles cannot be copyrighted so it's common to find books that have the same titles. There are even movies that have the same title. I can change the title but I'm not going to do that just yet.