The cover of the February, 1959, issue of Astounding Science Fiction features a painting illustrating the story “The Pirates of Ersatz” by Murray Leinster. I have not yet read the story, so I don’t know how faithful the painting is to any particular scene… but it does illustrate a common feature of many sci-fi stories and illustrations from that general era. Note that the pirate looks somewhat stereotypical for a “pirate,” bandana wrapped around his head, boarding a ship via ladder with pistol in hand. But where an old-school pirate might be illustrated with a dagger clenched in his teeth… this feller’s got a slide rule.
I am just old enough to have been trained on how to use a slide rule in middle school. And I am just young enough that the kids in the class found it to be an insanely stupid waste of time, as we had cheap pocket calculators that could do anything a slide rule could, far faster and more accurately. I seriously doubt that slide rule training lasted much longer… I have no doubt that some of those reading this blog may well have never even seen a slide rule.
But in the 1950’s, there was no practical alternative to the ol’ slipstick. Computers were giant room-sized machines prone to burning out vacuum tubes. The idea that by the mid 1980’s electronic calculating devices would be solar powered, the size of an ID card and so cheap that they’d be sold in the checkout line alongside gum probably never occured to *anyone.*
But the curious thing: many sci-fi stories from the 1950’s and a bit before/after featured hugenormous Univac-style computers, capable of running the numbers but devoid of graphics capability, speech and personality… and they also had humanoid robots running around doing everything from sweeping up to being best friends of the lead characters. I’m at a loss as to how the connection between the two concepts was so rarely made. What exactly made the robots work… some device that would fit within the robot’s chassis and would impart to them the approximate computational power of the human brain… but would not be able to take the place of the giant tube-filled computers that littered the future of so many 1950’s space operas?
Sometimes people just miss the obvious, I suppose. And it only becomes obvious decades later. I shudder to imagine what will look silly and stupid from 2010, forty years down the line…
9 Responses to “Not even close: Space Pirates”
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It’s safe to say that I’ve never seen a slide rule…
Not even one of these?
Hehe, I was taught to use a similar “computer” when I was in US Army Field Artillery serving as a Tactical Nuclear Weapons crewman. We had a “real” computer, it was pretty, in its biggiant box, which you dared not open because humidity and dust would kill it. That was early ’80s.
Scott:
“Computers” were huge “calculation” engines… they of COURSE could never develop sentiance, now the supposed “positronic” brain of a Robot was totally different and of course because it was so MUCH like a HUMAN brain we were constantly in danger of being wiped off the face of the universe!
An uncle bought me a very nice slip-stick and gave it to me as a birthday present in (I think) the early ’70s. Like the abacus I never did get around to learning to use it and have since been unable to find it again.
The timing on this is suspcious… This has nothing to do with the theme this year of “The Space-Pirates of CONduit” in SLC does it?
(Hint: Get your art in early and often :o)
Randy
I always wanted to learn to use a slide rule, just for nostalgia’s sake. Never got around to it, though. That round one is awesome 🙂
Well, yeah, everybody knows that it’s positronic brains that make them run! Funny, Asimov predicted the spellchecker (a robot, in “Galley Slave”) but, as I say, made it a man-shaped robot! He also predicted the Internet, sorta, and the problems that this would cause with kids cheating, in the sequel (I forget the name) to “Marooned Off Vesta”: “I want to get a Multivac Jnr outlet for the kids, but I don’t want it to be a crutch. How do you handle that?” “I look at each question first. If I don’t OK it, Multivac doesn’t see it.” (I may have got that a bit wrong). Murray Leinster predicted the Internet in “A Logic Named Joe”. I was in the last generation of students to learn the slide rule, and the first to get calculators, with our lecturers resenting the fact that we would “forget our tables” – teachers of the 1960s thought that reciting multiplication tables was some weird sort of virtue, and I don’t think they ever got used to the fact that it was now as useful as flint-axehead chipping!
Grif
> This has nothing to do with the theme this year of “The Space-Pirates of CONduit” in SLC does it?
Never heard of it.
Ours aren’t anywhere near as interesting as the one in your comment, but we still have a use for them at work.
Jim
Still a nice cover