We had log tables in high school up until 1981 when they brought in the calculator subject. The calculator they pushed did log, sin, cos, stats functions plus a heap of other functions you'd probably never use.
Our maths master had a portable programmable calculator in 1977-78. He was the only person allowed to use it. It was the size of a cash register and it ran on 240 volts. It was programmed by means of a paper tape. He spent hours once creating a loop program, which he had great pride in displaying to us in class one day. It did some calculations that resulted in a random number between 0.1 and 0.111111111 every half second or so, which only ever contained ones below the decimal place. When he turned the thing on it's side, it looked like a digital yo yo. That was the culmination of a degree in mathematics and a year's worth of maths department budget. ;)
