[conspire] [OT] hardback: Versalog, Slide Rule Instructions (c) 1951

[Steve Litt]

Michael Paoli said on Sun, 1 Jun 2025 11:59:06 -0700

>So, slightly off-topic, but I figure someone might actually be
>interested.  And no, I don't have the slide rule itself, just the book.
>
>Anyway, the book, hardback, quite good condition:
>
>Versalog, Slide Rule Instructions
>(c) 1951
>The Frederick Post Company
>~125 pages
>
>Looking to rehome it, I figure there's probably someone out there
>actually interested.  If interested, let me know.

I can't imagine a slide rule so gargantuan that it needs 125 pages of
instructions. If I remember correctly, all my slide rules did
multiplication, division, log, antilog, and maybe some trig. So I
located a PDF of the book:

https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/Manuals/M34_Post_Versalog_1951.pdf

The book's length says way more about the 1951 era than it does about
these slide rules.

Only a tiny portion of this book is spent telling you what the scales
represent. A bigger portion tells you how to do various operations with
the slide rule. With sample problems and answers. With explanations of
efficient and inefficient ways to use your slide rule. Then the book
explains typical calculations for Civil Engineering, Mechanical
Engineering, and Electrical Engineering, with all the most common
calculations in each and how to efficiently do them with the slide rule.

Were slide rules "user friendly"? Heckno, at least not by today's "no
training needed" definition. It took about 20 hours of training to use
them at a 7th grade level (multiplication and division). But as time
went on, you used it for logs, and maybe trig, and you got very fast,
accurate and reliable at its use. Your slide rule had no bugs. YOU were
responsible for lubricating it the way your teacher said to, and YOU
were responsible for adjusting it when it got out of alignment.

If you could operate one slide rule, you could operate them all,
because they were all the same. Sure, some had more or less scales.
Some were long and some were circular, but if you knew one, you knew
them all. That work you put in during Middle School gave you a skill
you used until 1971.

Remember in the movie Apollo 13 when things went wrong, they had to
calculate a sling-shot return trajectory on the fly? They all whipped
out their slide rules, calculated, checked each others' work, and came
up with an answer at lightning speed.

My daughter just got turned down for an accounting job not because she
isn't excellent in accounting, but because she didn't have enough
experience with the exact software they were using. LOL, before 1971,
an engineering job could just say "five years experience with slide
rule, steam tables and Forier Transforms". Yeah, that's an exaggeration
on the simple side, but compare it to the average job requirements
today.

So would I like to go back to a world of slide rules? Heckno! You'll
have to pry my dc, bc, Gnumeric, Python and numpy out of my cold, dead
fingers. My point is simply this: Much of today's software has been
made so complicated, in the name of "intuitive" and "pretty", that it
requires more training than a simple "just the facts" piece of software
that accomplishes the same thing. And there are 50 different,
incompatible, competing softwares for each purpose.

Lastly, our population has been gaslighted into thinking they're too
stupid to use software that doesn't spoonfeed them every single thing,
to the point where the software is an absolute mess to use. I was a
developer before MS Windows was standard in the office, and can tell
you the average secretary, data entry person and pretty much anybody
who could touch type could deal with Command Line Interfaces just fine.
GUI's OK, but the underlying application shouldn't look like a six year
old's room after ten of his friends came over, pulled out everything,
played with it, and then went home.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com