So I am re reading I
Robot by Asimov as its a text on an open university module I'm doing.
Its great fun revisiting this classic, I love Asimov and enjoy older science fiction as it's always interesting dipping into
retro-futurism and comparing it to current technologies and trends.
The first few
chapters are told as retrospective narratives by Susan Calvin regarding
early issues with robotics.. she is telling stories in 2062 about
things that happened to 2 roboticist trouble shooters around
now/2017... and of course Asimov imagined this all before publishing in
1950.
So as well as
reading what Asimov imagined the future would have created
(positronic brains the big one in I Robot) it's interesting to see
what technology available in the 1950's he imagined would still be in
use in his future world. Enter 'the slide rule boys'. At numerous
points the trouble shooting characters, Powell and Donovan, refer to
the 'slide rule boys' meaning the engineers and physicists working
for USRobotics creating the robots.... and yes.. it's sexist..I know.
For me (and I freely and proudly admit I am a slide rule fan who carries a slide rule every day) I
love that Asimov considered the slide rule such an important device
that it wouldn't be superseded by an imagined other technology, it is
testimony to the device and its standing at the time in the 1950s.
Although they have fallen out of popular use, falling prey to
calculators and computers, they are fascinating devices and powerful
tools for a variety of tasks to this day. The slide rule I carry
everyday (as opposed to the larger ones for home use!!) is an Aristo nr89 which can calculate a surprising number of
things by manipulating the slides, multiplication and division,
tangents and sines, diagonals of squares, inch to mm conversions,
circle areas and more and more. Interestingly for me slide rules also
gave me a more concrete feel for logarithmic scales... and.. the
Aristo 89 has a metric ruler on the edge so is quite handy for
..heck... drawing lines and measurements. :)
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