School days supplies

Draughts boards were not standard supplies

A chat with a friend brought back memories of the supplies I used in my school days.

Paper

Malaysia probably switched to the ISO paper sizes following the lead of the UK. The Internet tells me that foolscap persisted into the 1980s. Certainly some of the old papers I have are this size.

Writing implements

Fountain pens and wooden pencils were the main implements when I started school. Parker and Schaffer were competitor brands at the high end. Parker also made Quink. The Chinese came in with their Hero pens and inks priced much cheaper. Dropping a pen on its nib almost certainly ruined it.

Ballpoint pens existed but throwaway pens were too expensive for common use until mass manufacturing made them affordable in the 1960-70s in Malaysia. However the skinflints among us practised ball point pen transplants. This was something you did when the roller stopped working, possibly because you dropped the pen point down. In this procedure, you didn't throw away the pen but transplanted the ink tube onto a working nib, probably one which had used up all the ink in its tube. You had to be careful not to introduce an air bubble into the tube. You did this by blowing lightly on the other end to make a gob of ink ooze out and then you filled the nib with this before pushing the tube in. Naturally you needed waste paper to wipe any ink detritus.

For a while the nibs were all metal but eventually they became plastic except for the roller. I remember because we used to reuse the nibs (and the crystal housings) as electrical probes.

Besides wooden pencils, mechanical pencils existed but were too expensive for poor students. When one got to high school, those made by Faber-Castell or Staedler were within reach, but the leads were still expensive. The leads were the same size as the ones in wooden pencils so sometimes one opened up a short pencil to repurpose its lead in the mechanical pencil. Oh, and the lead sharpener was in the plunger button.

Japanese manufacturers such as Pilot and Pentel entered the market with thin leads which obviated the need for sharpening and the resulting graphite dust. 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm were a couple of standard sizes for the pencils and leads. They were quite popular and were a bit of a status symbol among schoolkids in the 1980s; I remember my nieces pestering me to buy a couple for them. Eventually single-use mechanical pencils entered the market.

Geometry set

Secondary schoolkids were expected to have a geometry set for general measurement, e.g. reading maps in geography. Some geometry problems were solved by construction. The contents of the box were: a 45-45-90 set square, a 30-60-90 set square, a 180° protractor, a 15 cm ruler (wooden then clear plastic later), a compass (used for drawing circles and arcs), dividers (used for transferring measurements of distances), pencil, sharpener and eraser. The link mentions a stencil, but I don't remember that; maybe it was omitted in Malaysia. The divider was the most useless of the instruments. We just used it to poke holes in our wooden desks.

My friend mentioned that the keen students stuck a timetable of classes on the inside of the metal box. Most classes tended to stay in the same classroom throughout the year, and the teachers moved between classrooms.

Calculators

A step up from doing arithmetic (especially multiplication and division) by longhand were log tables, which were taught in secondary school. They also taught us to use trigonometric tables. I remember owning a 4-figure book of log tables. I wish I had hung onto that, it would be a museum piece now.

My father who was into gadgets, had an addiator, made in the US I think. I quickly realised that combining this with a log book would allow me to multiply and divide. I couldn't convince anybody that it was practical. Too much trouble, said one person.

My brother had a slide rule and passed that on to me when I was in high school. Again I only managed to convince people I was nerdy when I said I could multiply and divide using that. Again I wish I had hung onto that slide rule.

Around the time I entered university, scientific calculators became affordable although still pricey enough that some people bought them in Singapore when holidaying or got a helpful person to, to save on import duty. Casio made the most popular models in my milieu. Some students could afford Texas Instrument or Hewlett Packard calculators. I wanted and saved up to buy a HP-25 programmable scientific calculator in Singapore and wasted spent many hours writing programs to implement formulae that I would never actually need. I still prefer RPN to Algebraic. Now my smartphone and desktop have a wonderful free HP-42 emulator. There was some question about whether programmables would be allowed in engineering exams but the faculty decided that the questions would be set such that having programs on hand conferred no advantage.

Today

And now?

Paper is now bought by the ream to be printed in laser or inkjet printers, something undreamt of in the days of mimeographs, waxed stencil paper, correction fluid (nail polish was an acceptable substitute), and oily, messy inks. But even this is diminishing as electronic copy displaces paper copy.

I have more ball point pens and pencils than I can use in my lifetime, I find them dropped on the street or otherwise discarded, or given away for free in seminars.

Measuring tapes are more useful to me than rulers and protractors.

Everybody has a smart phone now which can do far more than calculate. On the other hand, it's usually when I do hobbies that I need to calculate.