[walnutclosefarm]

Seeing that old Friden mechanical calculator under it's cover take me way back. We used them to do basic statistics on data sets in an NSF summer research school I attended after my high school sophmore year. What a sound a roomful of them could make.

At the time there was one computer on the college campus where the program was hosted - all batch, all punched cards, of course, and too valuable to be used for mere number crunching of undergraduate research. By the time I matriculated a year later, the physics department had its own PDP 8, and we did our number crunching on data sets punched onto paper tape, on that. Given the challenges in getting a data set properly punched and the cost of debugging, I'm pretty sure the PDP only saved net people time if you had to run the same computation at least several dozen times.