Several readers found errors in my statement about the availability of hand-held calculators and memory in computers. Here’s both my memory & the history.
Calculators: Hand-held calculators may have been available in 1973, but they were still ludicrously expensive. Simple four function calculators cost over $100 in 1973 dollars and would have been useless at a tech school. An HP 35, with math and trig functions very useful at a school like RPI, ran $395. Considering that tuition at RPI in 1973 was about $3,500, that was over 10% of tuition! Nowadays that would be over $6,000 for a calculator! Back then, very few students had that kind of cash. Most of us waited for a couple of years before the price dropped enough we could actually afford one. My first few years I used a slide rule, and most teachers would not allow calculators during tests for another 2-3 years.
One of the major topics of conversation of the day was which was better, the Hewlett Packard calculators or the Texas Instruments models. The HP systems had a “reverse Polish notation” method compared to the normal arithmetic “infix notation” used by the TI systems. I could afford only a TI calculator (the TI 30 model became available in 1976 for only $25!) but lusted for the HP. I ended up learning Assembly language programming their descendants.
BTW, that cost of $3,500 a year for tuition (not including room, board, & books) is correct. Tuition rose to just over $4,000 my senior year and it was an absolute scandal! How times have changed!
Core memory: RPI had an IBM 360 in ‘73 and had just upgraded the memory with the core memory I described in the year before. By the time I graduated, they had upgraded the whole system to a 370 model. Such core memory was still sold as late as ’75. I even checked Wikipedia to make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks.
I remember in high school taking classes in how to use a slide rule! We actually had a gigantic 10’ long slide rule hanging over the blackboard. I remember my father had a beautiful Keuffel & Esser duplex slide rule that I hankered for. By the time I got old enough to need it professionally, we had calculators.