IEAust Engineering Heritage Branch invites you to a presentation entitled:

Slide Rules and Mechanical Calculators

Speakers:	Terry Berreen
	Bruce Sandie
Date and Time:	Thursday, 28 June 2001 at 5.30 for 6.00 pm.

Since the 1970's engineers have carried out most of their computations using electronic calculators and computers. Modern computer programs often conceal from the users the size and complexity of the computations used to change input data to output. Before the age of electronics, engineers were all too aware of the magnitude of their computational tasks.

For most of the twentieth century, before electronic calculators and computers came into general use, engineers relied on slide rules, logarithmic tables and mechanical calculators to perform often long and laborious hand computations. Every engineer owned at least one slide rule and many design offices had mechanical calculators and these devices form an important part of our engineering heritage.

The speakers are Terry Berreen, Assoc. Prof. in Mechanical Engineering at Monash University, Clayton who has a long-standing interest in mechanical computing devices, and Bruce Sandie, Chair of the Engineering Heritage Branch, who has an interest in slide rules. They will describe the history and evolution of slide rules and mechanical calculators, illustrate some of the different forms they took and how they worked, and display some representative examples.