1. An article in Forbes Magazine (9/23/2013) on the pollster George Gallup, entitled "From Slide Rules to Big Data." It begins: "He was the man with a 'political slide rule,' as Time put it in a 1948 cover story."

2. A feature article in last Wednesday's (12/3/2013) New York Times in the Business Section, "Hands-On Bavarian Count Presides Over a Pencil-Making Empire." Slide rules are only parenthetically mentioned: "Still, Faber-Castell, founded in 1761 when graphite pencils were a novelty, has overcome technological shifts before. When Count Anton took over the business in 1978, after the death of his father, Count Roland von Faber-Castell, the company was a leading maker of slide rules. That was soon laid to waste by the electronic calculator. Then, in the 1980s, the advent of computer-assisted design soon gutted the market for its mechanical drawing products."

Fred Astren

SF Bay Area