Don't Try This at Home

So I found this page of historical Nikon stuff. Not of interest to many, I know, but there was one little item which might just blow your mind.

Talking about the 1950s design of one of the world’s first superfast lenses, the author notes, “The designers back then used only an abacus and a sheet of logarithms to conduct ray tracing calculations.”

And that was just for a normal 50mm lens. No wonder we didn’t get really good zooms until much later.