Blacksheep,
WOW a Faber-Castell!!!, I used to yearn to have one of those, ended up with a British Thornton , good enough for most things up to A level but the plastic cases were naff (I still have it, together with a neat wooden box that my dear old dad made for it).
I also remember going to a maths course for a week at Nottingham University while I was doing As where we used mechanical 'wind-up' calculators to do the stats. section.
Computer-wise, cut my teeth on an Elliot 803 then progressed to a PDP-8i: a six-foot rack of it. When the later PDP-8e came along we were amazed when a bloke turned up with a box under his arm and said 'where do you want your new computer putting,
then?'
But slide rules and computers can't really DO quadratics can they?
VnV...