Anything with a slide rule--and most stuff from the '40s mentioned 'em kind of makes me blink. I actually bought a slide-rule and I'll be damned if I could figure out how to use the thing. I get abacuses and mechanical calculators (where you rotate dials to do basic math functions) but slide rules are incomprehensible to me. I just read "
slide rulepocket calculator" and carry on.
And yeah, for me the "stupid prose tricks are more important than the story" fad of the "New Wave" of the mid-60s through early-70s is completely unreadable today (and it was back then, too.
).