[WalterBright]

Yeah, I've seen that table. It was just a few entries, if I recall correctly. Few enough that one could have gotten the numbers by using drawings instead of calculation. And there were errors in it, too.

> And yes, making such tables is inherently “awfully ugly and tedious”,

Yup, but people did make such extensive tables long before calculators, many thousands more entries than that chord table, and far more accurately.

[jacobolus]

Ptolemy’s table has the chords for every possible angle in ½° increments (360 table entries in all), to 3 sexagesimal digits of precision, or about 5.5 decimal digits of precision. It also had an additional column showing the derivative of the chord function at each ½° at 5 sexagesimal digits of precision, for use interpolating at arbitrary angles in between the listed ½° increments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy%27s_table_of_chords

You might be thinking of Hipparchus’s table (from a few centuries earlier) which only had multiples of 7½°.

[WalterBright]

> You might be thinking of Hipparchus’s table

Sounds like it.