Geoff, I bet you had a better slide rule than I did. They could get quite fancy. Mine was a pretty rudimentary thing with a few scales and not the best printing but it would still do most of the stuff in High School. I don't think I had all of the trig stuff that a better slide rule had. (sine, cosine etc)
Once I saw my first scientific calculator, it was clear things would never be the same. I saw guys doing stuff that we were doing on a mainframe in Fortran and it was in the palm of his hand (but cost as much as my car). Then they were a couple hundred bucks and they were everywhere. I paid about 30 for the one I have a number of years ago. If you look at the Windows calculator select view and select the scientific option you have a real nice one.
