I was the last of my generation to use a slide rule in college. Scientific calculators had just become affordable during my sophomore year, and the sound of keys clicking during a physics exam was pretty intimidating to those of us still sliding bamboo or twirling plastic.

I think that the younger generation has lost something in not learning to use one–it gives you a powerful insight into the nature of logarithms and mathematics in general, and it enforces an intuitive feel for orders of magnitude, because it doesn’t keep track of the decimal point for you. I recall grading exams as a TA that had utterly absurd answers on them because someone made a mistake on their calculator and didn’t bother to check it for reasonableness (example: the diameter of a copper atom is 1.3 x 10^12 meters…)

Anyway, they’re no longer manufactured, but predictably, people still collect and use them.

[Update on Monday afternoon]

Bill Simon (not the one who ran the incompetent campaign against Davis–the one who is my site designer) sends me a link to a virtual slide rule that really really works (for those who don’t even know what one looks like). It’s also the most precise slide rule ever designed.