Module 4 Unit 1

Abacus

This may sound surprising but most of the discoveries and inventions on which modern societies have been constructed were made in prehistoric times.

It is a good idea to think about the history of arithmetic, mathematics, writing and recording information.Man's invention of the computer resulted from man's need to quantify, to count and to do mathematic calculations. Long before the computer, in the Roman Empire, Ancient Asia, and other parts of the World, man was inventing easier and faster ways of counting and calculating.

The earliest counting devices known to man were his own hands and fingers. Primitive people needed a way to calculate and store information for future use. To keep track of the number of animals killed, they collected small rocks and pebbles in a pile. Each stone stood for one animal. In other words, early man counted by means of matching one set of objects with another set (stones and sheep). The operations of addition and subtraction were simply the operations of adding or subtracting groups of objects to the sack of counting stones or pebbles. Early counting tables, named abaci, not only formalized this counting method but also introduced the concept of positional notation that we use today.

The next logical step was to produce the first "personal calculator"—the abacus—which used the same concepts of one set of objects standing for objects in another set, but also the concept of a single object standing for a collection of objects, that is positional notation.

The Chinese abacus was developed about 5000 years ago and it was men’s first attempt to automate the counting process. It was built out of wood and beads. It could be held and carried around easily. The abacus was so successful that its use spread form China to many other countries. And it is still in use in some countries today.

The abacus does not actually do the computing, as today's calculators do. It helps people keep track of numbers as they do the computing. People who are good at using an abacus can often do calculations as quickly as a person who is using a

calculator.

All in all, only when the process of counting and arithmetic became a more abstract process and different sizes of groups were given a symbolic representation so that the results could be written on a "storage medium" such as papyrus or clay the process of calculation became a process of symbol manipulation.

(Adapted from: http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/abacus.htm)

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