Analogue

computers.

A new colleague teaching a new Open University course (TT284, Web Technologies, if you care to know about that sort of thing) and I were discussing my modest and his impressive background in computing - and found that we both keep one of these handy.

The smaller, older one was my Dad's, which he used to calculate such details as the effect of the rotation of the earth on the range settings for the 8th Army artillery, as a young staff officer in North Africa and Italy between 1943 and 45.

Mine merely got me through Applied Maths and Physics A levels. I am happy (but probably wrong) to recall that Pure Maths disdained anything so vulgar as actual quantities.