Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Remember pencil, and paper?

Me too..... But I have whole 5 gallon bucket of flat carpenter pencils from about every lumberyard in the state. I think I only used 2 of 'em, since taking the ranch job. I reckon if times get hard, I can sit on a street corner with a cupful of them for sale......

Yep. I remember all of those for sure. The triangular ruler for mechaical drawing too. How 'bout a french curve template?

I thought I was the only one who collected carpenter pencils.
Should have known.

In the Marine Corps, the office clerks called hole reinforcers "paper azzholes" and White-Out was called "pigeon poop".

Usually you also had to have a big pink erasure on the side because the erasure tips on the pencil were always chewed off.

Pink pearl eraser!

I was kind of disappointed to find out my son, graduating in May in Aerospace Engineering, was never taught to use a slide rule. PS: no way could I remember how to give him a lesson... I do remember my first calculator cost $83 back in 1970something. You can get one now for $2 that will do the same work.

I use carbon paper every day at work. Erasers are as crappy as pencils these days. My kids have a mess on their math homework when they need something erased.

I still pay all my bills by check, and I write myself notes everyday on a desk calendar. I also still hand write seed orders for my customers.....nuff said....

A couple of my years with the Highway Dept. Surveying, I was on a parcel crew (land surveying) instead of location surveying, and we had an electric eraser. Back then, it was all calculated by hand. Looked up sines and cosines in a book. Lots of the old hands had the common angles memorized. You also had to convert DDMMSS to Decimal of Degree. Lots of notebook paper used. We also calculated curves the same way, right on the hood of the truck. miles

I know this is hijacking the thread, but do you have any idea what buckwheat seed sells for up there. I am having trouble finding it here, and may have to order and have it shipped. miles

I use a calculator. iPhone has one built in. I can still 'cipher', but it's just faster to use the electronics.

Mom and Dad drew the prints for his house, in pencil... on the inside of a shoe box lid. Gave it to the contractor and that's what he used to frame it and get it in the dry.

And many of the diseases that formerly ravaged mankind have been virtually eliminated as well; the world has become a better place in many ways.

In college in the 60's, I was very proficient with a slide rule. I still have it but have forgotten how to use it. A friend studying engineering bought one of the 1st calculators on the market. It cost him over $400 (triple that in today's money). It was big and didn't have near the feature of a $50 version now. I had a couple friends studying these new gadgets called computers. They carried punch cards around in plastic boxes. They couldn't carry a computer without a forklift.

I would go to the computer lab with a friend who was in com sci (he used to sing, "Virgil, quit com sci ...", to the tune of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down") and type punch cards for him. The place always was a madhouse of students typing cards, picking up programs, and being amazed at the volumes of pages generated when their program went into a do-loop.

Interesting thread . . . I still have 6 or 7 drafting pencils with different leads in them (2H, 4H and HB as well as red, yellow and green) have a rotating sharpener to keep the point right. Several Pentel mechanical pencils. 3 or 4 triangular scales, a drawer full of triangles and templates. 4 sets of compasses and two T-squares. 36" x 48" drafting table w/ drafting machine and a bunch of scales. Electric erasers made mistake changing much easier, but still left shadows for the Diazo machine to print out . . . Made my living with them until about 1991 and we switched to AutoCad. My drafting supplies don't get much use these days but I can't get rid of them. Used to do complete structural design calcs with paper, pencil, slide rule and the "built in head calculator".

I prefer to write checks and use stamps to online bill paying.

Old dinosaurs are hard to kill, apparently .

I still insist on getting paper bills in the mail because I want a hard copy marked PAID to prove I did. But I pay them electronically. No worries that the Postal Orifice will lose a check and screw my credit rating.

I too have drafting tools, slide rules, T-squares, and mechanical pencils tucked away. Along with a pilot's navigation calculator (mechanical) for figuring true air speed, Mach number, and wind drift.

I'm still using a solar powered Texas Instruments hand calculator that adds, subtracts, divides and multiplies, plus does percentages and square roots and some memory functions that work off of a stack, and that's it.

Bought it in 1985 for $5 at some big box store and it still works great. No batteries, just open the cover under any light source, even flourescent, and it starts up. It has a small manual that shows you how to use the memory stack functions to do some pretty complicated calculations.

Of course a cell phone of the same size today will do what a TI super scientific engineering extra deluxe calculator used to do, and that's just the side functions. But I like it since it still does about 99.9% of any calculations that need doing in my life.


Just wish it had a pencil holder....

You can't beat a pencil and paper