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Comment by boxfire | Hacker News Reader

I read the article hoping to see examples of reasoning that the slide rule instilled.

It reads more like a jealous rant than anything else. He fails to cite why those plans developments were so fast (hint it wasn't the magic of a slide rule.... It was a decade of design and test in products before the one with the name he assigned all credit to)

He also has a sort of confirmation bias here, failing to note things we could not have possibly done without computers. Try a Martian sky crane landing without atmospheric modeling ha ha.

Anyone have a reference for rules of thumb type thinking or other insights that come from slide rules?

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Moreover this doc makes it more apparent how much he waxes without real references: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090007797/downloads/20...

> Routine calculations were made using slide rules. More complex calculations, such as stress analysis, required Friden mechanical calculators.

Fascinating read. No the SR-71 didn't appear out of thin air in a sprint of intensity unheard of on earth to date. Turns out after the U-2 taught us so much we said let's make a higher, faster U-3 and then spent a decade on that concept in a series of designs and tests.

I really wish that this kind of cherry-picked mythos building fact wasn't what made half of what built the perception of good engineering to most of my present and future colleagues.

While this blog post is over the top, I think it is more charitably read as the real-engineer version of "your hobby project or 20 person startup is not a FAANG". Hobby projects or startups are not limited by their ability to scale with massive load spikes or coordinate thousands of code contributors, trendy solutions used by FAANG aren't going to help.

Similarly science students, machinists and most engineers working in the physical world are not NASA performing atmospheric models, they are not limited by their ability to perform arbitrary precision calculations. Giving a student a slide rule may help them build an intuition and deeper understanding than giving them a TI-89 or copy of Mathmatica.

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