Comment by pawelmi
4 years ago
Interesting! Wikipedia says that E6B is "one of the very few analog calculating devices in widespread use in the 21st century". What are those other few?
4 years ago
Interesting! Wikipedia says that E6B is "one of the very few analog calculating devices in widespread use in the 21st century". What are those other few?
If anyone has a chance, I can heartily recommend a visit to the Arithmeum in Bonn. It is a museum of calulation/calculators not only situated in a beautiful building, but also home to many fine and sometimes interactive manual / mechanical calculation devices. Some discrete, but it also houses the world's largest collection of sliderules. There were tons which had very specific usage, e.g. in farming. No clue which are still being used today, but I bet plenty still are.
https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/en/arithmeum.html
I use a slide rule similar to the E6B for calculating feeds and speeds to run a milling machine.
Some manufactures used to give away promotional slide rules, like the capacitor company would send you one that lets you calculate the right size of capacitor for your application.
Does an abacus count? (heh)
Oh, also: old timey cash registers, though they're _rare_.
I'd consider both abacus and a mechanical cash register (or even mechanical arithmometer) as digital/discrete devices, not analog; analog calculation would refer to slide rules, nomograms and the like (of which I'm sure there would be more than the slide rules and nomograms, but nothing comes to mind..).
Yeah, on thinking about it, seems like you're right.
Too bad, I can no longer think of any then. I think ballistic computers were at one point analog, but those should all be obsoleted now.
My understanding is that the “Wulff net” is still used in geology, though nowadays computers probably do most of the plotting.
Seems like a lot of machining -- creating threads and the like -- is done with mechanical calculating devices.