Dad said his slide rule got put away as soon as desktop electronic calculators came out, late 1960s. By the time you were in school you must have had those Ti calculators with the red led displays, right? Plus there were the HP RPN well established by then for serious work. PC computers were coming out as well, I think we had a couple of Apple IIe's in 8th grade in school.
I'm not trying to bust on you, I'm just suprised that in a few years slide rules would have vanished so quickly. I don't think I heard of one mentioned in an academic setting till college.
You underestimate my poverty, and slide rules were obtainable with little more than dumpster diving back in the early-mid 70's. I was thrilled when they came out with pocket calculators, that made slide rule prices plummet to near zero. I couldn't afford something like a TI-30, much to my good fortune.
I got a Pickett H500 when the local college bookstore was throwing them away. And I won a Pickett N600 at the Arkansas Region 8 science fair in 1976 (although it wasn't delivered until 2005, that's another story). I used that for a long time, still use slide rules occasionally. I can't use the Picketts any more, too hard to read for my old man eyes. I got some Post Versalogs (including a green cosine model still in the original unopened package) more recently but then I discovered the Aristos and those are very easy to read and use. I use a Nestler Polymath Duplex in the "6"" size because that, too is easy to read.
I also had an early RPN calculator that WAS NOT and HP - it was a National Semiconductor scientific calculator (with LEDs, of course) made for about a year in 1975. That's all I had through college, and it finally crapped out after spending a few days lost in a snowbank, then I got an HP-11C (the 15C little brother, missing only the hex/dec/bin conversion, for the most part) that I had until very recently when I gave it away to someone who admired it. I then moved to the HP-32SII, that's still the best. I also have some Hp-33 and HP-35S that are still available and work nicely. I also have 3 HP-48s (one of those still in the unopened box) I bought as a precaution when Carly shut down the Corvallis plant.
For the record, I was 50 on July 28th, hence my eligibility for "Geezer Points" in The Hurl.
Brett