Another excuse for more failures:-)

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

on 08/02/2022, Fredxx supposed :

It has always been a kWh, since the dawn of electricary.

[Jack Harry Teesdale]

Correction that should be 17.2 mph

[Andrew]

I had a summer holiday job at one of the BP research sites (where Dad worked) in 1970. They had an HP? desktop scientific calculator with those wonderful glowing nixi tubes and was the size of a shop cash register of that era. Someone said it cost £10,000

[Andrew]

Reverse Polish ??

[Andrew]

But what sort of TV did you watch it on ?

[Fredxx]

I was probably told to spend the first 10 minutes just reading the questions before answering any!

[Andrew]

Go FORTH and program ..

[charles]

we watched it n one which was in thehouse of friends of my parents. No idea of thr 'sort'. It was simply a TV.

[Steve Walker]

Never mind RPN, Forth lets you redefine anything, which is way more confusing!

: 2 3 ;

2 2 + . gives you 6.

[Colin Bignell]

Obviously, black and white with, by today's standards, a very small screen. I remember going with my mother to buy it at a fairly distant electrical shop, as not many people sold them, and getting a taxi back with it on the open luggage platform. That may even have been my first taxi ride as we lived in London and public transport or walking got us most places.

[Max Demian]

"Someone said." I used a desk calculator in 1971. "Someone said" it cost £300.

[Colin Bignell]

I saw one of those in a lab, probably a couple of years later. It had its own dedicated operator and nobody else was allowed near it. If they cost that much, I'm not surprised. You could probably have bought a five bedroom house in London for less back then.

[Tim Lamb]

Vickers shipbuilding test tank at St. Albans were using mechanical calculators in 1972.

>

[Tim Lamb]

Friends of my parents and B&W

[Tim+]

Both wrong for speed.

440 yards take 3x52 sec = 156 seconds

1 mile takes 156x4 = 624 seconds

Distance covered in 1 hour = 3600/624 = 5.769 (or 5.77 to 3 sig figs) mph.

Tim

[Jack Harry Teesdale]

The question says it takes him 52.3 secs for 440 yds. Therefore 1 mile (1760yds) would take 4x52.3=209.2secs

Then 3600/209.2=17.2mph surely?

[Tim+]

52 times 3 for 440 yards in the paper I?m looking at.

Tim

[Fredxx]

Yer-but doesn't 440 x 4 = 1760? Therefore 52.3 x 4?

[Max Demian]

Chugga-chugga-chugga (multiply). Others in the office complain at the noise. <Ignore>

[Sysadmin]

In 1971 I also got a new calculator at enormous expense. I purchased a Hewlett Packard HP-35 that operated in reverse polish notation. I was contracting to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy labs at Windscale at the time and doing gas flow calculations for the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor. Data was from a test rig representing one reactor channel. The calculator was so expensive I had to claim tax relief through my little self employed business.......happy days.