Information / Electronics & Computing

Abacus & Counting Aids

Counting boards with stones or beads make numbers tangible: the first step toward calculating with tools.

Counting boards such as the Sumerian abacus (from roughly 2700-2300 BC), the Roman abacus and the Chinese suanpan allowed fast addition and multiplication without writing. The Antikythera mechanism (~100 BC) shows that antiquity already built gear trains for astronomical calculation. For the first time, part of arithmetic was handed off to a device.