as I came in, and I was in the engineering program initially, everybody had a slide rule
and they were all strapped on our belts like six guns. [laughter]
And that's how you walked around campus,
with your slide rule, which was a hundred bucks, which was a lot of money,
but you had your slide rule, typically there was a little belt loop and you put it on your belt and that was your six gun,
so everybody walked around with a slide rule.
Well when I came back calculators had just been invented,
and I could screw this up but the idea is kind of right.
That was one of those things that the idea was great but the timing was terrible, all right?
I don't know that you got this in the Technician but I'll go ahead and air a little bit of dirty underwear here.
There was a group that was very concerned that in this transition that we were getting electronic calculators
--now remember again for everybody looking at it today, these were four-function calculators, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
Okay? So, you can get them for a dollar or two-forty-nine today.
Yeah. People today have no idea what the evolution's been.
But they were like, and I'm going to say two hundred dollars. I don't know what they were but they were expensive,
and so a lot of students really just didn't have the money
to be doing this and there was this transition.
I mean you did have to know how to read the slide rule. It didn't come out in a digital display
and you just wrote it down. You had to know how to play with that thing.
So somebody, and I don't remember who it was,
came up with the idea, okay, let student government buy some and then we'll rent them,
which the appropriate objections were raised, the appropriate, you know, this is the good stuff.
We had checked out our market, we thought everything was good,
and so we bought--. I don't know how many calculators we bought but anyway
we started renting them, and as I recall it was a very popular program.
I mean when the chemistry was going to give an exam or math was going to give an exam all of them were gone, all of them gone.
But they were two hundred bucks apiece. Well the dirty underwear was,
and I think this was even when I was still in office, something had happened and the price on those things took a dive to like twenty-five dollars.
I don't know what it was but it just dropped.
So here we were holding a lot of calculators that weren't being rented nearly as much and of course it petered out over time,
and I don't know whatever happened. I hope we sold them or something
but it was one of those deals where it looked like a really good idea, it started out as a good idea, but in the end
it would have been good a few years earlier but we were close enough to the end that it could have gone either way.