When I went to college, the professors were deeply suspicious of (some openly hostile to) electronic calculators. They would not allow them to be used in class. You had to demonstrate that you knew how to do it on your slide rule. "Slide rules have always been used for scientific calculation and electronic 'calculators' will fall out of fashion just as soon as the public realizes just how unreliable complex electronic equipment will be." (I'm still waiting -- good thing I didn't hold my breath, huh?)

The computer on campus was a series of cabinets with enormous tape drives (used for loading programs) and a washing-machine-sized housing for the processor. The processor was not a chip, but consisted of several circuit boards with "solid state" components. They had a new hard drive, donated by a now-forgotten business. It was proudly displayed in the window of the Computer Science building. Someone had installed a transparent panel on the HD cabinet so you could see the disks spinning at a leisurely one or two RPM. ISTR being told that it had 64 kilobytes of memory.

The first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack PC-1, with an impressive 1 kilobyte of memory. It was programmable in BASIC and had an LCD text-only display.

I suspect that my scientific calculator ($14.00 @ Wally-world) has more processing power than any of the above-mentioned items.

I wish I still had my slide rule, though...

--SSgt Baloo