I go back to High School and college, working in the Soil Physics lab at Oregon State. I was the "Student Lab Assistant", which meant I had free run of the place and 90 cents and hour when I was working. I built all the experiments used in the classes, and learned a lot about soil physics. Rather interesting. (One benefit was the ethyl alcohol in the labs. Since, oddly enough, everyone in the department was Mormon, and there was no use for the stuff anywhere at all, my friends and I drank it. No one ever questioned my frequent requisitions, either. I'd just add it to whatever from Central Stores, and over it came.) Another benefit was being able to use the lab for my work when I went to OSU, OSC at the time. I could do a terms worth of Semi-Micro Quantative Analysis, Chem 204, 205, 206, experiments in one afternoon, to an accuracy the instructors sometimes didn't believe.

A group of us would get together for homework there because we had access to the state-of-the-art calculators, Monroe-Marchant and Frieden. We'd do trig, including calculating simple paths of bombs dropped from airplanes travelling at such and so with winds from wherever, and even with logs we'd need a calculator. The teacher wanted enough precision to rule out using slide rules.

So, there were were, pounding away on these things by the hour. We would perform "distributed calculating", dividing the work as best we could.

The point was, that mechanically there was NO WAY to calculate square root. Actually, as I recall, there was, but it involved subtracting and subtracting and subtracting forever, and it took longer than what we always did.

Which was estimate, and try again, and again, punching in numbers over and over and over until we came close enough.

Anything Vista has will be better than that.

Arf