I still use an old envelop, and lead pencil to do some figuring at times.

Any old gaffers recall the days?

There was the, "Oklahoma calculator", a Big Chief Tablet, and a lead pencil.

My collection of pencils was HUGE. Of course part of that was because I had a drafting table at home. Mechanical drawing was my love during high school.

What's an envelope ?

I have everything on auto pay.

I'll forward a few bushels of my junk mail to you Denny!

Or a napkin at the cafe.

Real napkin is OK, but a paper towel much beats a paper napkin. miles

Absolutely!

Oh, the things that have been designed and concocted on a napkin!

I have nothing on auto pay. If they cant send me a bill... they dont need/want my business.

I actually still use old paper and pencils for figuring stuff occasionally, (when the pocket calculator's not handy). Old habits die hard. Still got a pencil sharpener mounted to a bench top that you have to crank by hand, (remember those?). My step grand daughter, when she was about 5, used to ask if she could sharpen pencils every time she came to visit. She was fascinated by a hand crank pencil sharpener. Lots of kids now have probably never seen one.

Me too. Pisses me that SuddenLink charges me an extra dollar for mailing me the bill.

And the ones that have seen one probably couldn't run it!!

Of course I remember pencil and paper. There are some who claim I remember clay tablets and a stylus, but that's a lie. I only go back to papyrus and a brush.

I do, however, have fond memories of carbon paper, mimeo machines, hole reinforcers, slide rules, and mucilage bottles with red rubber tips.

I'm a pencil guy. Just got three nice Pentel .7mm mechanicals for crosswords and figgerin'. Going mechanical is about the only way to get soft, dark, lead without going to a stationary store. Apparently, they think we want to use our pencils to write on diamonds.

DOOODS, stifle .

When I was a kid, we always had a drawer full of pencils that had apparently been around for at least a hundred years. The erasers were more or less solid and would smear any "lead" to which they were applied. A little extra push and they would gladly rip through the paper.

this sort of still have slide rulers and triangle shaped rulers with the
six different scales and all my fingers and toes for counting

norm

I just showed my kids how to use an abacus last night. Does that count?

My old ran ran a fairly successful construction company on the back of used envelopes.
I honestly don't remember ever seeing him write anything on a note pad.

Pizza boxes for the really big jobs.

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

Hewlett Packard fan myself. Got an 11C close at hand as we speak. RPN kicks ass. miles

I get my bills in the mail, and then pay them online. It's easier, faster, and easier to prove in the event of a dispute.

But I don't (can't) take any electronics on the job with me. I still do a lot of figuring with a pencil and a piece of a box, or some soapstone on the side of a duct or column. Younger engineering types get elastic eyebrows...

I don't think I'll ever be able to wean myself from RPN. Still run a 15C Engineering/Scientific model.

Did a lot of manual drafting coming out of college. Koh-i-noor ink pens, Leroy lettering templates, French curves, highway curve templates. AutoCAD and desktop computers were a godsend.

I go both ways:

You guys are fancy, my needs are simpler.

If Walmart sells toothpaste in a 3.2 oz tube for $2.47 or a large economy size 7.4 oz tube for $5.81, which one is cheaper per ounce? And I know they do those oddball sizes on purpose just to make it harder to figure out in your head.

OR

If my sight radius is 23.5" and my group is 5" low at 100 yards, how many turns of a 40 tpi adjustment screw does it take to move the group on target?

Mine too. I took drafting in the 10-12th grades. There was none of that CAD stuff back then. Draw 'em in pencil then ink them in.

Mike

i always have writing materials

Or sell them on e-bay as antiques...........



And KE Rapidograph pens for making fine even lines. Liked KE wooden slip sticks too.

When I was a REAL telephone man, not a pack swapper, we used paper azzholes to tag the leads we lifted when we changed out defective relays. Wrote the contact numbers on the little rings.

I always licked them to make sure they stuck, but some guys just hung them on the wire ends. One sneeze and it was Oh Sh*t time.

I have a couple of LNIB 48GX's, anybody interested?

All I can say if any of you were 4th gen in office supplies you'd have stores full of this kind of CRAP.
I do, old stuff, in original boxes put away.
One day I'll flood Ebay with it.
Ind rolls of Scotch tape in tin cans.
Wooden display boxes full of nibs.
Arrow staplers that haven't been made for 50 years.
Old Pentel mechanical pencils
etc, etc

The sign on the wall at the lutheran church I had to do a fire inspection on the other day... said... if you need more than 3 copies, please use the mimeograph....?? I remember that smell of the mimeo running copies of our tests at school some years ago...

My TI-85 gave up the ghost a year ago. Bought a TI-89 Titanium to replace it, but I'd prefer to have another TI-85 despite it's lower memory and capabilities. I took drafting in high school. CAD was just getting started in industry, but in school, we were still doing it the old fashion way. I competed in drafting at the industrial arts competition in Waco, TX as well as wood shop and metal shop. My father was a designer with Texas Instruments and Rockwell International. I still have his drafting set in a case.

I still use a specialized slide rule for certain work related calculations. All the young guys use apps for the same work.

I carry a pencil on daily basis. Doesn't freeze up when I am trying to write figures in the winter.

That 48GX model is what we used to do sun shots. Strange how many cloudy days, early and late, there were. It would clear off when the sun got too high of an angle to do them. miles

An HP 41CV user here though I started with an HP67 my brother handed down. That one had a card reader so I could write "code", store it on a card and just run it through when needed. IIRC it was a $750 piece in the day. I still have the mechanical pencil I used throughout college. I can't imagine how much lead and eraser that thing has seen. For a short period of my early employ (1985 - 1987) I wrote on a five cc pad. Soon after Shell developed their own "email" system. Though archaic by standards just five years later, it was a blessing.

I do that all the time. When my kids are doing math homework, I have them do the same. The look at me like I have an extra set of eyes on my forehead.

Shocker...they know how to do quick math now, without a calculator.

Hear hear!

I have some 40+ year old Koh-I-Noor #2 Writing pencils that are in stark contrast to the junk that passes for pencils today.

I use an Excel file as a checkbook. I set up a page that's easy to use and calculate. I pay the bills though the bank's bill pay then just enter them in the file same as a check or debit purchase.
When my 1st wife died 10 years ago, I ordered 2 boxes of check blanks with just my name on them. I'm on the last book of them now. I got remarried a couple years later and we ordered 2 boxes with both of our names. We have about 2 books of those left. We don't write very many checks.