this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Wow. In America, trades people use a chart to look up literally anything that requires math. If you’re lucky.
Most of the time “it looks good enough” is enough.
I've had an economics teacher in the Netherlands who had interest tables and wanted us to them too. For those before calculators, those are tables that list the years on the left, and the interest on top, and then the multiplier in the table.
So, 10 years at 6.5% = 1.877
This was in 2005i sh.
Could you use a slide rule for that kind of multiplication?
Absolutely. But I learned in 2005, and the electric calculator had replaced the sliderule a couple of decades earlier.
But this is something they were great at, but usually not with the same accuracy. It's hard to get more than 3 decimal places out of one, and tables are great for that, you can fill whole books with them.
In my study time it was the only which exists, still no electronic or computers , only in big companies, which worked with punch cards.
I would use an Abacus for multiplication and a Venier scale for accuracy