Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately.
In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel.
I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
Yeah, a slide rule's supposed to be good to ~3 digits, and I was imagining maybe the crude ones you're hacking up are only good for 2. The one I picked up out of curiosity is a bit sticky in its action, alas, so I haven't been excited about getting into it.
I'd suck at "inventing" anything impressive & practical -- so it'd be hard to get heard about germs, etc., etc., which I do know.
