Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for January 15, 2022

When I was a freshman in college, Texas Instruments had just released their “inexpensive” version of a calculator to compete with the “expensive” HP one. Several students had one or the other. The college decided to have a contest to see who could calculate the fastest with their calculators by having them multiply and divide a series of numbers. I protested that I should be allowed to compete with my slide rule. They finally humored me and let me compete too. I won.

TBF slide rules are inherently cool.

Of course after the passage of time, or when this strip was first released, record players both old style and digital are in vogue again.

When I started high school my father gave me a new slide rule. I never used it and never even learned how to use it. I used a calculator instead.

Four years after this comic was printed I got my first CD player as a Christmas gift. It was a “portable” unit – no speakers but a line-out and a headphone jack. It had the option to run on a battery back. The battery pack took ten double-A batteries and would last a glorious 90 minutes before it became a container for ten dead double-A batteries.

This off-brand unit from inside a Sears (or was it J.C. Penny?) Christmas Catalog had a price of over $500 in 1989.

So I can see why Oliver’s Dad isn’t quite ready to embrace the technology yet.

Loved CDs when they came out. Replaced most of my music with them. No more scratches, pops, hisses and skips. Now I have everything on MP3s and even better.

For a number of reasons, CD’s simply sound different than LP’s. Which one is objectively “better” is a debate that still rages in certain, obscure, circles. Certainly CD’s can offer better sound for less money, but there must be a reason why LP’s outsell CD’s these days. And now there’s Mp3’s and streaming…

Back in my college days slide rules were quite expensive. We’d use them in Physics classes BUT when it came test time, and since everyone didn’t have a slide rule, you couldn’t use them on tests. You know, everyone was on a level playing field. After my dad died I got his really nice slide rule in a leather case. For that one there were scales that I still don’t know how to use. Overall, I’ll still use mine on the phone.

The constipated mathematician worked it out with a slide rule.

The most difficult thing about a slide rule was figuring out where to put the decimal point. Otherwise, it is easy peasy.

Now I have every song in the universe in my shirt pocket.

Actually I would think Oliver would enjoy using a slide rule.

Pretty ironic considering vinyl is back and CDs are out of favor

Don’t toss it so fast, Oliver – vinyl’s on a comeback.

Maybe that’s really all you need. Because you need to figure powers of 10, you got a really good idea if the answer was reasonable. With calculators and computers, you have no idea, so you assume it is correct.

There are people who collect vintage slide rules. I am 68, and I am just old enough that I had a basic slide rule I used in high school.

Does anybody remember the circular slide rule? They were popular for nerds with worn out pocket protectors

leaping forward in time to today, vinyl is definitely making a comeback.

Vinyl is still appreciated even today.

IIRC, it was a big deal for the Skylab crew to be equipped with an HP 35 (?) four function calculator. About the following year, it was for sale to the public for $395. In high school, students of a certain teacher were easily identified by the slide rules protruding from the tops of their backpacks. He wanted all of his students to have the same handicap.One of my continuing education courses included computing discount cash flows with a calculator rather than a spreadsheet program. It’s possible to do a simple one that way, and if with a calculator then with a slide rule as well, but no rational person would make a habit of it.

cds scratchless? HA.

And yet, today, the opposite would be true. He’d get a CD player and want a record player.

A good ole Slip Stick!

There are, then, those who insist that vinyl is the superior medium for musical recordings, Oliver….

CD’s – and digitized audio in general – do NOT make perfect reproductions of the sound. They, at best, APPROXIMATE the original sound. They start by chopping the original sound in to small pieces, then assign a number to each piece and store that on the CD (or other media). To play it back, the player reads each number and produces an analog signal to approximate that numerical value and THAT is what you hear “played back”. It may sound pretty good, but is definitely not the original sound.

And now kids want vinyl again.