“150 Extra Engineers.” This 1952 IBM advertisement for the IBM Electronic Calculator is not dissimilar from today’s marketing for the latest artificial intelligence (AI) innovations: “An IBM Electronic Calculator speeds through thousands of intricate computations so quickly that on many complex problems it’s just like having 150 EXTRA Engineers.” Curious how much (or little) has changed? Explore more in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
Interestingly, the ad places a graphic of a dapper gentleman next to the IBM Electronic Calculator in the lower left corner, while an army of men holding slide rules dominates the rest of the page. (True to the times, the men in the illustration are all middle-aged and white. One fun detail is the use of a cool atomic symbol next to the IBM logo.)
From essential tool to tech relic
Despite the ad campaign, it was another 24 years before electronic calculators fully eliminated the slide rule. On July 11, 1976, K&E manufactured its last slide rule, which was given to the Smithsonian Institution.
Today the legacy of the slide rule—once ubiquitous with the pocket protector in nerd culture—is kept alive on multiple websites, some of which feature virtual slide rule simulations. Slide rules rely on the use of logarithms to speed up multiplication and division. The Scottish mathematician John Napier invented the logarithm concept in 1614, and then in 1620 English astronomer Edmund Gunter began experimenting with visual representations of logarithms. The Rev. William Oughtred is generally credited with invention of the first slide rule in 1622, which is when he placed two Gunter’s scales side by side and demonstrated the ability to do calculations by simply sliding the scales. French military officer Amédée Mannheim invented the basic (and portable) 10-inch slide rule in 1859.
Try out a slide rule simulation on the website of the International Slide Rule Museum.
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Photo: Lana U / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.