Dennis,
This story doesn’t go back too far (like the picture of the slide rule) in your feature. When I was a freshman forestry student at Tech in 1996, I attended classes at the Ford Forestry center. All of the other forestry students attended Fall Camp in Alberta during their sophomore year. There were three of us (Chris Mueller, Kyle Russ, and I) who played football and so it made sense that we would go to Fall Camp during our redshirt season. Chris Mueller and I were lab partners and had the amazing experience of taking classes that fall from Dr. Glenn Mroz, Dr. Peg Gale, Dr. Kurt Pregitzer, and others. We learned so much that fall. What our wonderful professors did not cover was how to use Microsoft Excel. Chris and I would spend hours in the cafeteria with our TI-82 calculators running the forester’s constant (.005454*Diameter²) on pages of plot samples from the field. It was always strange to us how other students (who took basic computing skills courses at Tech) would be done with their calculations so quickly. About halfway through the semester someone taught us this little trick on a computer to just copy and paste equations. What a find! We must have wasted countless hours punching buttons on a calculator when the solution was only one click and drag away on the PC. Thanks for bringing back this nightmare…………..I mean memory for me!
Gordie Mosher, 1996-2001