Calculator Accuracy & Usefulness

[Les Bell]

(05-23-2015 11:42 PM)Matt Agajanian Wrote:  how vital, useful, essential were these scientific & programmable calculators in technical, scientific disciplines in the past[?]

They weren't essential, but they were incredibly useful. I grew up with the slide rule in school, and then got my first calculator as a second-year engineering (actually, cybernetics) student. The difference was staggering - not so much in terms of accuracy, as in eliminating the effort of keeping track of the decimal point. Replacing manual addition and subtraction was pretty cool, too. After that, access to logs and exponentiation was cream on top.

Mind you, the first time I submitted an assignment with 10-digit precision in the answer, I got marked down and was subjected to a stern lecture on the nature of measurement error, accuracy and precision.