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Reply to "The Mice Strike, AGAIN!"

Oh right, Nixie tubes.

Gordon, I think the last time you brought up that Wang Labs calculator, I mentioned there was one in a Navy electronics lab I somehow managed to land a summer job in. (Insert long story about how temporary summer relief ‘civil service’ jobs were available to teens in the ‘60s if you scored high enough on the test.)

Anyhow, what I remember about the thing is that it did multiplication the same way a slide rule does - by taking the logs of two numbers, adding them together, and taking the antilog of the result.

So, if you multiplied 2 times 3 on this absurdly expensive thing that was the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, you could get an answer something like 5.999873.

Which any self-respecting, practical engineer would round up to ‘6’.

Q.E.D.

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