296.366 - 2016 project and mechanical calculators

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

mechanical calculators

mechanical calculators!  whatever made me think of them?  they don't even exist any more, do they?  maybe in museums?  although there was never anything aesthetic about them.  they were about as pretty as a Volkswagen bug, or a boxer dog.  but pretty wasn't what they were built for.  back in those long ago days, electronics meant radios, or televisions, both of which were still built with tubes.  you may not even know what a tube is, or was.  it was a very, very different world then.  trust me, if you didn't know it, you want no part of it.  not even mechanical calculators.  but back in those days, when you had to do arithmetic on a long column of numbers - say a year's worth of daily profits - you were so glad you had access to a mechanical calculator.  you would enter the first number and hit the plus key and enter the second number and depress the crank and the calculator would rattle and ratchet and rumble and hiccough and stop, then you would hit the plus key and enter the third number and depress the crank and the calculator would rattle and ratchet and rumble and hiccough and stop, and you'd do that for 366 numbers or however many there were, and at the end you'd have a trial sum.  then you'd do it all over a second time, and if the two trial sums were the same, you either had an accurate sum or you'd made the same mistake twice.  given how meticulous most of us are, it was horrible.  the one part of this we haven't improved with electronic calculators is the human input part.  if we ever solve that part, we'll have heaven on earth.  but among mechanical calculators, the champion was the Friden.  I remember putting in astronomical numbers, really, like the distance from the sun to the earth or some such, and multiplying two of those for whatever insane reason I had, then watching and listening as that Friden chugged and chewed and...well you have the picture, for however long it took to run those numbers through.  the Friden was about twice as fast as a human at multiplying two really big numbers but it was maybe ten times more accurate.  it didn't make a mistake, except letting a human input the numbers.  damn, I admired those calculators and especially the Friden.  I just knew that if I were a real mechanical engineer, I'd've been able to envision whatever corresponded to the algorithm for adding or multiplying numbers with ratchets and gears.  me?  I couldn't even understand how a Hydramatic transmission worked, just that it did.  all hail mechanical engineers!  really!  but I'm so damn glad I got to work with electronic computers after the age of tubes.  so damn glad!