<p>Guilty as charged, but only in high school and I was the sort who preferred the uber-nerdy round ones. By the time I hit college, electronic calculators with the four basic arithmetic functions and maybe even a square root key were selling at a price that most engineering students could not afford to turn down.</p>
<p>People who have never used a slipstick do not realize the power of having to estimate the size of their answer in addition to running the calculations. It makes them much more prone to accepting numerical results without critical thought.</p>