The Pride Slide Rule
A real slide rule on your desktop, wearing your flag: use it, learn it, and watch it solve calculations step by step.
What it is
The Pride Slide Rule puts a working slide rule on your screen and teaches you to use it. Drag the slide and the cursor as you would on the real thing, read the scales under the hairline, and learn why a strip of wood could multiply, divide, square, take roots and read sines and logarithms long before electronic calculators existed.
It is the same instrument as The Slide Rule, with the same thirteen lessons and the same engine. What is different is the rule itself: it carries a pride flag, and you choose which.
Seven flags
Rainbow, Trans, Bi, Pan, Lesbian, Ace and Nonbinary. Each is a finish for the instrument, not a filter over it: the flag is printed along the top and bottom of the rule, in thin bands, the way a real slide rule carries its trim. The published colors are used as published.
Switch between them whenever you like, in Settings. The rule remembers which you chose.
Readable first
A slide rule is read at fine resolution, so legibility was never traded for color. The graduations are light, outlined, and drawn on a dark stock rather than across the stripes, and every one of them is measured against every surface it can sit on. A flag that made the instrument hard to read would not be worth wearing.
Three ways to use it
Classic. The instrument, exactly as it was: a body, a slide and a glass cursor, with a live readout of every scale under the hairline. Zoom in to read the finest graduations.
Learn. Thirteen lessons take you from reading the scales to chained calculations, with the target shown on the rule, every move checked, and quizzes that ask you to read the answer yourself. Progress is kept on your machine. Write lessons of your own as simple files.
Modern. Type a calculation, such as 2.4 × 3.5, the square root of 17, or 100 × 4 × 1.5 squared, and watch the rule work it out, movement by movement, with the reasoning beside each step and the exact answer next to what the rule can be read to. Step through at your own pace, or replay any calculation from your history.
Two instruments
Start with the classic four scales (A, B, C, D), or switch to the extended rule with ten: reciprocals on CI, cubes on K, logarithms on L, and sines and tangents on S, T and ST.
Made for everyone
- Every control works from the keyboard.
- The slide and the cursor are real sliders to a screen reader, and readings are spoken.
- Feedback never relies on color alone, which matters more here than usual: no flag is ever the only thing telling you something.
- Reduced motion is honored.
Yours, offline
No account, no sign-in, no network. Your settings, lesson progress and history stay on your machine, and you can export them to a file and carry them to another.
Get it
Available on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11, and on the Amazon Appstore.
There is also a plain edition without the flags, The Slide Rule.
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