I'd argue that a sliderule is at least something you can manipulate with your hands and immediately see the output relationship.
Tangent, I use a tape measure at work and you can fold it back on itself to make a basic slide rule for quick addition and subtraction without bothering with fractions :)
Having built an RPN evaluator at summer camp, I appreciated that my friends were learning it, too, on the HP-48.
In college, I literally never used it. A simple scientific calculator was almost always more useful.