In 1968 I stepped off a plane in Memphis, TN.  I was about to go through some concentrated electronics training.  At the time, I did not know that.  Indeed, I was going to go through 16 weeks of training in thirteen weeks.

Back then, they didn’t have calculators, leastwise not anything like we have today.  They had adding machines that weighed about 20 pounds.  Most of them didn’t even have the ability to multiply.

When I went through the school, we all carried slide rulers, often called slipsticks.  At best they were accurate to 4 places and we had to keep track of the decimal on paper.  Of course, we could simply perform everything on paper.  That would have likely taken 10 or 20 times longer.  Some operations (such as algorithms and trig functions) would have been virtually impossible.

This afternoon, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and started messing with it.  I noticed it has a calculator.  Moreover, it could be set to scientific mode.  WOW.  I thought how nice it would have been to have something like that when I was learning electronics.

Bottom line is, back then I had the problem without a solution.  Now I have the solutions without the problem.  I haven’t had to solve any trig functions in decades.

Of course, they have very advanced, programmable calculators nowadays.  They can solve problems in a few seconds that I spent three or four minutes on.  Not only that, the calculation can have an accuracy of 10 to 14 places.  Makes me wonder all the more why the dummycrats can’t do basic math.