SlideRuleInterface

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Comment I made here : http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/07/11/the-lure-of-slide-rules/

with respect to this : http://www.davosnewbies.com/2004/07/08#theLureOfTheSlideRule

I wonder if there's an interesting analogy to be made with vinyl records. Once upon a time these were a storage and publishing medium for music. More recently, with the publishing and storage role gone to CD and MP3, they've established a niche as a user interface for DJs. It's precisely the manipulation that they afford due to their size and shape that keeps them going.

It's got to the stage where you can even hook up turntables to a Linux box and use an arbitrary record to scratch an MP3 file.

So why not a physical slide-rule-like interface to a SpreadSheet or maths program? The slider could be generally mapped to a range of data or charts or variables. Occasionally, it would be used for something approaching it's original purpose.