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abacus
 Encyclopædia
Britannica Article |
plural Abaci, or Abacuses,
calculating device, probably of Babylonian
origin, that was long important in commerce. It is the ancestor of
the modern calculating machine and computer.
The earliest “abacus” likely was a
board or slab on which a Babylonian spread sand so he could trace
letters for general writing purposes. The word abacus
is probably derived, through its Greek form abakos, from a
Semitic word such as the Hebrew ibeq (“to wipe the dust”;
noun abaq, “dust”). As the abacus came to be used
solely for counting and computing, its form was changed and
improved. The sand (“dust”) surface is thought to have evolved into
the board marked with lines and equipped with counters whose
positions indicated numerical values—i.e., ones, tens,
hundreds, and so on. In the Roman abacus the board was given grooves
to facilitate moving the counters in the proper files. Another form,
common today, has the counters strung on wires.
The abacus, generally in the form of a
large calculating board, was in universal use in Europe in the
Middle Ages, as well as in the Arab world and in Asia. It reached
Japan in the 16th century. The introduction of the Hindu-Arabic
notation, with its place value and zero, gradually replaced the
abacus, though it was still widely used in Europe as late as
the 17th century and survives today in the Middle East, China, and
Japan; an expert practitioner can compete against many modern
mechanical calculating machines.
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