Then there are those of us who trained on the artillery board and were exposed to FADAC. When we got GFTs, we thought we had died and gone to heaven. I still think the plotter was a retrograde step in a lot of ways.
If it interests anyone, at the school in 1975-1976 we were looking for a replacement for the machine we used to do the survey computations. It was an analogue machine that was used in German banks and money changing offices and required the operator to look up natural functions of angles to enter in it, so it was slightly more advanced that the cross bow. Somebody pointed us to the HP21 and HP22, and the locating section were tasked to assess them as a survey computing device. Anyway, long story short, the locating IG, Capt Mike Jeffery, walked into my office to tell me he had come up with a program for the calculators that would do basic computations for field gunnery. The SMIG and I took Mike to see the commandant, who called the Director of Artillery. Before we got much farther, the HP41C came on the scene, and the rest, as they say, is history.
To indicate what a leap in technology this entailed, the pocket calculator had only been on the market for a few years. I bought one in 1972 for 99.95 that only had four functions - add, subtract, multiply and divide - and no memory. We had a debate in the school about buying slightly more advanced models to issue to students a few years later.