good shorthand for "the time before computers, when math was done with meat and dinosaurs roamed the earth"

Oh, OK. I couldn't see what approximate calculations using logarithms had to do with random integers.

Also, I learned to use a slide-rule in the sixties; I 've never touched one again until I inherited an antique, a few years ago. Nobody was using slide-rules in the seventies, surely.

Stylistic flair.