True nostalgia joke (presumably incomprehensible to recent generations):

God created pairs of all animals and told them to go forth and multiply.

The snakes refused on the grounds that they were adders.

God angrily threw them on a nearby table and spoke out, "Even adders can multiply on a log table!!!"

Anyone remember having a certain reference book with columns of numbers?

Then I spent a year in school learning how to calculate to 10 digits of true precision on a slide rule!

Twelve months later the HP35 came out, and my year of learning was suddenly totally wasted.

Except the first year of calculators I could calculate faster on my bamboo stick than the rich kids with their new toys. They also frequently came up with goofy answers, ranging from (How much is 2x2?) "Uh, 3.9999." to (How much is 23*46/111?" "Uh, 953,153,153,153.000"

Sigh. :O)

Welll ...

I've been collecting film, video, kinescopes, etc. of every 1960s and early 1970s performance I can find. I now have several hundred DVDs. You mentioned Airplane. Here's one I just looked at this afternoon:

Go Ride the Music

It's Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane in two obscure concerts. I think it was filmed in 1969, but I don't know if it was filmed before or after Woodstock. It uses a lot of the same multi-camera techniques. If you're up for nostalgia, it's worth renting, although these are not the definitive performance by either group.

If you want a real nostalgia kick, rent the Dick Cavett "Rock Icons" three disc set. The first disc was taped the day after Woodstock. It features Airplane; Crosby Stills, etc.; and a VERY bummed out Joni Mitchell who skipped Woodstock because her manager told her the Cavett national TV audience was more important, and he couldn't guarantee she'd be able to get out of the festival because the roads were blocked. CSN&Y rented a helicopter and made it back. Legend has it that immediately after they taped the Cavett show, she went back to her room with boyfriend Graham Nash and wrote "Woodstock," based on the stories and vibes she picked up during the Cavett show.

Disc 2 has some fantastic Janis Joplin performances. I must have close to fifty of her performances, and she is one performer who NEVER gave a bad performance. She may be one of the greatest 60s talents of them all.

If you want listings of some of what's available out there, drop me an email and I'll send you my fifty page Word document of what I've got so far.

As for the HP-35, here's my story about that:

HP-35 Unfair Advantage

I posted this over at the HP Museum back in 2000.

Ah yes, nostalgia ... I live for yesterday.

HP-15c (1981) here -- sits beside me and used frequently. It retired from science when I did.

And the HP12C is still sold after an absolute eternity.

Try coming up with a way to improve that one!?!

Thanks for the Woodstock trivia, tres cool!

Yup, I have my HP 12C right here on my desk... given to me when I worked for the company, in 1981. Twenty-seven years ago, amazing.

Can you imagine what the manufacturing cost is for each 12C today? Maybe $2? And these things still sell for about $70! There's a brief story here about the development of the 12C.

I also enjoy the fact that one can get a utility that puts a virtual image of the 12C on your desktop, with buttons that operate exactly as the physical unit.

EDIT:
Regarding the HP-35, I can recall how excited everyone was at the college bookstore when it first came out. We nerds were also excited to discover, soon after, that it had a bug--if one typed in "exp(ln (2.02))=" the unit gave the answer "2" instead of "2.2" (exp and ln are inverse functions, effectively canceling each other). Later versions of the HP-35 had a firmware fix.

John Meyer mentions in his link about Stanford banning the calculator, based on the unfair advantage it gave to those who could afford the purchase price of $395. After adjusting for inflation, buying that calculator in 1972 for $395 would be equivalent to buying it for a bit over $2,000 today. No wonder they were banned for a while.

Absolutely disgusted with my two daughters for going into raptures listening to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The "Sixties" changed life forever, even for us grown ups. The second World War had stolen our own youthful dalliances and it seemed that we resented the new young amongst us being able to, 'let it all hang out'.
Only now, in the evening of our lives, do we admit that they didn't turn out so bad after all and that it was only our own jealousies that had us wishing, oh! that we could have lived the same joyful years as they have done. However, in retrospect, we did have a free fireworks display every night during the London blitz and a sing along with Bing Crosby, huddled together in our community air raid shelters. Our meagre food rations kept us trim, taught and terrific.
When the Yanks came to town, it was a bonus for us kids. "Got any gum, chum", was the catch phrase that we used, to weedle out from our American visitors those tasty sticks of gum we had only seen in our weekly visit to "the pictures". Those were the days, my friends.

When the Yanks came to town, it was a bonus for us kids. "Got any gum, chum", was the catch phrase that we used, to wheedle out from our American visitors those tasty sticks of gum we had only seen in our weekly visit to "the pictures". Those were the days, my friends. If you were in England during WWII, then God bless you.

My wife's parents were both in England in the war. He was in the RAF, and she was in the land army. They (and my wife) moved to this country (USA) in 1955. They couldn't afford, obviously, to call home using transcontinental/transoceanic telephones (they were in California), so they sent tapes back and forth. As a result, they taped everything, as did their relatives. When they went back to England for a visit in the early 1960s, everyone got together and discussed the war and they taped the conversation. I have heard the tape and it is amazing to hear them talk about what it was like when the bombs came down.

My uncle, on my side of the family, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, but has never talked about it (lots of hand-to-hand combat), so this is the only time anyone I knew talked extensively about what it was like to be bombed.

Not wanting to bore readers of this forum with my own wartime memories, of which there are many, I can't let this opportunity pass without mentioning Hope, Crosby and Lamour in their series of "Road", films. They were a wonderful escape from the horrors of air raid shelters and of surfacing, when the bombs finally stopped, only to find shattered homes and visions of the WVS ladies handing out hot tea to the lucky ones who had survived just one more night of terror. Hope, Crosby and Lamour enabled us to forget, if only for fleeting moments, of mans inhumanity to man.

The "Road" pictures are still great fun to watch.

My wife's uncle was too young to fight. His memories of emerging from the basement after a bombing was that he and his friends would run around and collect all the aluminum foil. Apparently it was released by the bombers in an attempt to jam the new-fangled thing invented by the British called RADAR.

"run around and collect all the aluminum foil"'

In my generation, it was called chaff and was still in use in the late '60s. By that time, the USAF had a "career field" called ECM (electronic countermeasures). There were more advanced methods being used, but the B-52s still dumped chaff as they approached Hanoi.

Chaff ("window" or "dupplel") was a late introduction (1943) even though both Germany and Britain realised before the war that it was an effective counter to radar. It was such a simple countermeasure that it could be easily copied, so as soon it was employed by one side the other would quickly understand its function. So its use was withheld, neither side knowing that the other possessed the countermeasure. First use was in a British air raid on Hamburg in 1943, followed soon after by the Germans in raids on London. It should be mentioned that RADAR wasn't a uniquely British invention, for Germany also developed it prior to the war. There was a pre-war goodwill Zeppelin flight over Britain whose actual purpose was to survey UK radio transmission wavelengths to determine whether they had developed radar. They missed the radar because the Brits employed a much longer wavelength than the Germans thought useful.

Ha-ha-ha, good miss!

Seems like some people don't learn from history...

One recent U.S. Stealth Fighter was totally invisible to modern radar, but on flights over former Eastern Europe they found that the plane was picked up by old longer wave radars.

And then to add insult to injury, it was later discovered that these planes could be detected through reflections of cell phone signals from towers in the countryside...

Yeah, I've heard that about stealth technology being compromised to a certain extent with alternate detection methods. I think the basic stealth premise is that anything you can do to detect them before they detect you is still the driver. Sure makes for some interesting aircraft shapes.

One of the highlights of my sales career at HP back in the early '80s was getting a chance to see, up-close, a B1 bomber out at Edwards AFB (one of my accounts) just after the development program was taken out of mothballs by Reagan (please, no politics tonight). My primary contact at the base had lots of stripes and stuff on his uniform, and one afternoon, he said, "You want to see something cool?' We walked across the taxiway to a large closed hangar with posted armed sentries. A few words and we were inside, and after adjusting to the dark I saw TWO B1 bombers, one white and one in camo paint. The white one had the boarding stairs lowered from its belly. My escort then said, "Want to see inside?" Oh, man, would I.

We climbed up the stairs, and I was surprised that there was no open space--none--inside. It was just a narrow walkway maybe 20 feet long up to the cockpit. Half the cockpit seemed to be glass; the crew had an expansive view of their environment.

Anyway, I mention all this because my contact said all the racks lining that narrow corridor to cockpit were full of ECM electronics. So things have changed a lot from WWII days of dumping bits of aluminum chaff.

Sorry for getting off on a tangent here, but man, to an airplane lover those swing-wing B1s were stunning.

By the way, HP had won the contract to supply the minicomputers that did the final certification checkoff of the B1s before Rockwell handed them over to the Air Force, which is why I was involved in the first place.

Nazareth then Budgie and Deep purple and of course Led Zeppelin

Learnt nearly all of Zeps riffs by the time I was 20 went to the war in Angola for 3 years saw first hand mans inhumanity to man, had my fill after 3 years
Refused to continue and spent 18 months in detention for refusing and during that time listened to and played a lot more rock with another 2 guys who also objected the one guy got 6 years for refusing and served 4 years.

We are still good buddies today and we still listen to Led Zeppelin

My daughter who is sixteen said to me the other day

Dad this guy was trying to chat me up and heees old
How old I asked
Cheeees he’s like 25


I say no more

Sorry, can't help releasing some more of my memories of wartime Britain. Good job Blink decided to put this thread under the OT banner. Us young lads used to scour the streets, looking for pieces of shrapnel. These prized collections may have come from a bomb, an anti aircraft shell, or even a piece of a German Dornier. We used to trade the "best bits" at school, once normal schooling had begun, some twelve months or so after the "blitz" had ended. In the latter part of the war, me and my mates set up our own "early warning system", for the locals. It was designed to give advance warning of a "Doodlebug". This was the name given to Hitler's V1. The first of his two secret weapons that he thought would once more turn the tide of the war in his favour, after being defeated on every front he had opened.
The only warning a Doodlebug would give, before exploding on the ground, was the engine stopping after running out of fuel. Our "early warning system" was a piece of railway line, suspended on a tripod. As soon as the dreaded drone of the Doodlebug stopped, we knew that it would land somewhere in the near vicinity, so we then commenced clanging the piece of railway line with the heaviest hammer that we could find from Dad's shed. It was very effective actually. It sent all the locals scurrying for the nearest shelter, with the full knowledge that we were pretty good at our job. It made us immensley proud. No such luck with Hitler's V2 though. These were the forerunners of today's space rockets, except that they had an explosive nose cone. There was no warning. Just an almighty explosion wherever they landed. In fact, one landed in the same street as our school and we were called to Assembly the very next day to say prayers for one of our teacher's who had been killed.

"My daughter who is sixteen said to me the other day

Now that's funny.
I got called "old" by one of my kids the other day. It was such a shocker when it happened too. I never considered myself as being "old" before and I can certainly remember the look on my father's face when I called him "old" so many years ago. That look kind of puzzled me.... NOW I understand!