When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator.
TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous.
— Sent from my iPhone XS
I have tried to explain it to my wife, but she can't grok it. I'm going to have to buy one from fleaBay to get her to understand.
When I entered the workforce and met engineers much older (say, born 10+ years before I was in 1970), they'd often have one in a desk drawer, but they weren't using them either.
As a pedagogical tool it is much superior. People who spend a few months using a slide rule come to a strong intuitive understanding of logarithms that no number of purely symbolic exercises with logs can ever match. Slide rules are also quite efficient tools for doing approximate calculations, much faster than pen and paper.
For anything too sophisticated for a slide rule to handle, students should use a general-purpose programming language and a full-sized keyboard.