Accuracy?

[Mike Elzinga]

(06-19-2021 03:07 PM)Mike Elzinga Wrote:  Taking logarithms amounted to finding a mantissa for a number between 0 and 1 and adding the appropriate characteristic.

I should have said that logarithms on the slide rule and in tables were for numbers between 1 and 10. There were several scales that allowed going between common logs and natural logs as well as square roots and cube roots.

By the way, slide rules went extinct in less than a year once handheld calculators came out. The big advantage to calculators was that they could also add and subtract. Adding and subtracting required another set of techniques of regrouping calculations to maintain precision. For example, don't mix very small numbers with very large numbers when adding or subtracting.

I don't miss my slide rule; especially after HP started introducing its calculators.