Memory Lane: Pencil, paper, punch cards, and collaboration

Imagine a world without technology—no computers, internet, or electronically searchable databases. In 1972, when I began my graduate studies in chemistry at Syracuse University, the mainframe computer that students could access was a room-size system programmed using Fortran, and the program had to be transferred to a stack of punch cards to run. Any mistake had to be tracked down and corrected, and a new stack of punch cards had to be created. These processes required hours, if not days, to provide the information we needed.For simple or complicated math calculations, pencil and paper, and perhaps a slide rule, were must-have supplies. I was fortunate to be in a research group that had a large desktop electronic adding machine with some limited programming capability. It certainly made analyzing kinetics data much easier—as long as there were no data entry errors. Even without errors, the rule of thumb was to double-check the results via the more tedious pencil and paper route. Automated data collection and analysis was just a dream.That same year, 1972, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld calculator, the HP 35, that could perform trigonometry and exponential functions in addition to standard addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Never mind having to become accustomed to using reverse Polish notation. The device was functional and accessible, and it quickly made the slide rule obsolete. The following year, my research group invested $395—about $3,000 in today’s dollars—in an HP 35 for the lab. Kinetics calculations became a piece of cake.By 1975 it was