6 Mar
2013
6 Mar
'13
4:12 p.m.
On 03/06/2013 01:57 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Were there ever slide rules made for bases other than
10 (say scales from
1 to 8 or 1 to 16)? Those little 'move the sliders with a stylus and hook
roudn for carry' adding machiens did esist for other bases. The octal and
hexadecimal oens showed up on Ebay a few years ago. Unfortuantely they
sold for about \pounds 500 each (due to their rarity) which was a lot
mroe that I would spaend on a curiousity
There are all sorts of useful gizmos that are little more than a stick
of wood with printing on it. A slide rule is a good example. Hanging
in my shop is a souvenir from a timber-cruising course I once took. It
allows you to measure DBH (diameter at breast height) and a sighting
scale to determine the height of a tree to the nearest 10 feet and then
a table to compute Scribner volume in board feet. Someone who saw the
scale in inches might mistake it for a yardstick--it does have an inch
scale on one edge.
Are there any similar sticks for, say, estimating the number of cards in
a punched-card deck?
--Chuck