A friend from Engineering School recently made a semi humorous post on Facebook about his first solar powered calculator that he had rediscovered in a drawer – actually a slide rule (need light to read it!), this started me thinking how things have changed since school and University in the 70s and 80s. When I was at school, whilst we had calculators (not that old!) we were not allowed to use them in exams, we did however have slide rules. In my first year at University of Auckland Engineering School we had to do some lectures on slide rule use for engineering, despite the fact that we also had to have (and could use in exams) early programmable calculators – in my case a Ti58. These were quite sophisticated and you could do some fairly complex programs using them.
Whilst we studied computer programming at university, the input was not a keyboard but Mark sense cards which you fed through a hopper and waited for the printout  (no screens). We never got to use a computer with keyboard and screen – the Engineering School had three of these, but they were only for Masters and PhD student use. 
 The first time I used a computer with a keyboard and screen was in 1983 when working when we used a pair of Sinclair Spectrum home computers running Basic for some engineering calcs – this was an 8-bit computer with 48kb memory – and you used a TV as the monitor – by comparison my current PC has 32GB of memory!