So I am pretty sure that most of us have used or at least seen an abacus before. I had one when I was growing up and I mostly just played with it. I don't think that I even tried to make any type of calculations on it. I just used it as an imaginary prison for my little brothers or a futuristic weapon of my imagination or one of many more variations that I could come up with.
Recently the discussion we had about computing in my history class went way over my head. We were talking about Turing machines and whether problems are computable or not. I had been doing a little bit of reasearch before class and I even went to one of my friends who is a math major but none of that really seemed to help me get my mind around the concepts. Talking about it in class did help me understand the general concepts a little better but I decided that I needed to get a better foundation to be able to understand.
So that is when I thought back to the abacus. The abacus as we know it today actually originated in Asia around 1200 AD. There were many precursors to this device the first one around 2700 BC in Mesopotamia. That device was based off of a sexagesimal number system. It uses 60 as a base number as opposed to our decimal system which uses 10 as a base number. These devices aided in calculating large numbers. All though they do not compare to modern computers and calculators they helped dramatically in simple arithmetic operations.
So after I looked up some of the history of the abacus I decided that this my chance to learn how to actually use an abacus for it's intended purpose. I found this great site that explains fairly clearly how they work. It is very simple and can accomplish some very cool things. Also, check out this video
So I learned a little more about primitive computing. Maybe this is what my parents had wanted me to learn when I was a little kid. Well I guess better late than never and I think my childhood use of this intrument was probably a little more entertaining.
