Re: Silver coins
  By: Joe Mackey to NANCY BACKUS on Tue Jul 31 2012 06:53 am


 >   I knew a guy I once worked who did his math with paper and pencil, then us
 > an adding machine to verify he was right.  :)

I renovated a house belonging to an old friend in his 90s. His kitchen dated
back to the 1960s. When I took out the cabinets to re-face them, I found a
sheet of butcher paper covered in longhand arithmetic - it seems they
measured and laid out the entire kitchen by hand.

I'm old enough that pocket calculators just started showing up in homes when I
was in late elementary school. Longhand arithmetic was still mandatory, but we
were allowed to double-check our work. I'm glad I was forced to do it all
longhand; my first job in/out of college was data entry in a general ledger
system, and I could adding/subtract columns with 30-40 entries more readily
than people who were a few years younger than I.

  
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