The main use of logarithms was to torture poor unfortunates such as myself. To multiply two numbers together, you would would look up the logarithm value for each in a book, then add those values together. Then, you would look up the result of that addition in the antilogarithm chart to get your decimal answer. I seem to remember something about "bar one", in a value like 1.08 - which meant that the 1 was negative but the .08 was still positive. All very confusing, and of doubtful use in the modern age.
