Part 1: The Abacus
Even before humans could read or write, they needed to count. First they used their fingers, but when they had to deal with figures over ten, a counting device became necessary. Pebbles and bits of wood arranged on the ground were used to count goods and to figure prices. These were the predecessors of the abacus. The abacus has two distinct variations: the counting board and the bead frame abacus.
The earliest counting boards – possibly used as early as 3000 BC – probably involved pebbles and twigs and lines in the sand, so it is no wonder no such boards have ever been discovered. The oldest surviving counting board is the Salamis tablet, which was used as early as 300 BC in Babylon, and which was discovered on the island of Salamis in Greece. The Salamis tablet is a large flat slab of marble with sets of lines for different figures. Similar boards were also used in ancient Greece and Rome and in medieval Europe. These used ‘counters’ to keep track of figures. Greek and Roman ‘counters’ were usually small stones called calculi while Europeans used coin-like pieces of metal. The counting board may seem now like an outdated invention, but it was still being used in England as late as the 18th century.
The bead frame abacus as we know it today was probably invented by the Chinese sometime around the second century AD. It is usually made of a wooden frame with 13 vertical wires and 7 beads on each wire. The Japanese adopted and modified the Chinese abacus around the 17th century, reducing the number of beads on each wire to six and later on to five. A third form of the abacus is the Russian abacus which was probably brought to Russia from China and was modified for counting in rubles. Other ancient cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians and the Aztecs also used similar calculating devices. Without being influenced by the Chinese, the Aztec abacus evolved into a very similar device: it had exactly the same number of ‘beads’ and ‘wires’ – in this case, the beads were kernels of corn and the wires were strings.
The first counting devices were very simple. Neither a counting board nor an abacus performed any numerical operations on its own. The calculations were performed mentally by the person using the abacus, and both of these devices were only used for recording separate steps and keeping track of figures.
The abacus may seem obsolete in the world of modern computers, but in fact it is still in use in many countries around the world.
The Abacus: Questions
Answer the following questions about the abacus:
1. The first counting device was …………… .
a. the Chinese abacus
b. the Salamis tablet
c. the human hand
d. the counting board
2. Why does the earliest counting board date only to 300 BC when
counting boards were possibly being used in 3000 BC?
_____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ are
calculi?
3. What
_____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ 4. Which two types of the abacus were directly derived from the Chinese
abacus?
a. Aztec and Japanese
Egyptian
b. Japanese
and
c. Egyptian and Aztec
d. Russian and Japanese
5. The Japanese abacus …………… .
a. had a wooden frame and five or seven kernels on each string
b. was made of marble and required the use of ‘counters’
c. was derived from the Chinese abacus in the second century AD
d. had a wooden frame and five or six beads on each wire
6. The basic function of the abacus is to:
a. help one in counting, in a passive way.
b. keep track of figures smaller than ten.
c. replace the calculator.
d. keep a record of past financial transactions
7. Match:
a. _____ abacus was invented in China    1. 21st century
b. _____ abacus still used in England    2. 18th century
c. _____ origin of Salamis tablet    3. 2nd century AD
d. _____ abacus still used in many countries 4. 300 BC
Part 2: The Era of Mechanical Computation
With the need to deal with higher and higher figures, a more sophisticated counting machine became necessary, but little progress was made beyond the abacus until the beginning of the seventeenth century, whose great minds gave birth to the first ideas concerning mechanical computation.
The first counting device - a mechanical “Calculating Clock” was invented by Wilhelm Schickard in 1624, but was forgotten for a time, so the man usually credited with inventing the first mechanical calculator is Blaise Pascal. Pascal, a French scientist and inventor, created a device in 1642 which, unlike the passive abacus, performed mathematical operations in an active manner. This calculator, cal
led the ‘Pascaline’, could add and subtract numbers with up to eight digits, but was never used much because of its high cost and unreliability. German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz studied the Pascaline, and by means of an innovative gear system added a third function: multiplication, which was performed as a sequence of additions. The first mechanical calculator that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions was built by Frenchman Charles Xavier Thomas of Colmar more than a century later. Colmar’s ‘Arithometer’ of 1820 was widely used until the beginning of the twentieth century.
The first step towards the creation of computers as we know them today was made by an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage. Early on, he realized that all mathematical calculations can be broken up into simple operations which are then constantly repeated, and that these operations could be carried out by an automatic, rather than a mechanical, machine.
He started working on a ‘Difference Engine’, but after ten years he abandoned it for the ‘Analytical Engine’ – the real predecessor of the computer. The plans for the colossal steam-powered Analytical Engine made use of another great invention, punched cards, created in 1820 by Joseph-Marie Jacquard for use in looms. The cards were to function as programs. Sadly, Babbage never completed the machine, largely due to poor machining techniques of the time.
Punched cards were also used seventy years later by an American inventor, Herman Hollerith, who created a computing machine out of necessity. He was charged with the task of computing the U.S. Census, and so his machine used punched cards as a primitive form of memory to store data rather than as programs. Although still mostly mechanical, Hollerith’s “computer” was the first machine to use electricity, thus bringing to a close the ‘Mechanical Era’ of computation.
The Era of Mechanical Computation: Questions
Answer the following questions about early calculating devices:
1. Explain the most important difference between an abacus and early
calculators.
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________ 2. The first mechanical counting device was invented by ……… in ……………
Pascal,
1820
a. Blaise
1624
Schickard,
b. William
c. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1642
d. Charles Xavier Thomas of Colmar, 1820
3. The first machine which could handle multiplication and division was…
Pascaline
a. the
b. Leibniz’s innovation of the Pascaline
c. the
Arithometer
d. the Difference Engine
4. Which of these statements is true?
a. In 1820 Colmar’s Arithometer was no longer in use.
b. The Pascaline could add and subtract ten-digit figures.
Engine
was powered by electricity.
Difference
c. The
d. Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built.
5. The man who first planned his machine to deal with mathematical
operations as sequences of simple repetitive tasks was ______________________________.
6. Punched cards were …………… .
Charles Babbage in 1820
a. invented
by
b. used as programs by Herman Hollerith
c. first used in looms in 1820
d. used for storing data by Joseph-Marie Jacquard
7. Which of these was not a part of Herman Hollerith’s computer?
a. punched cards used as programs
power
b. electrical
c. punched cards used as memory
functions
d. mechanical
Part 3: Early Computers
Babbage and Hollerith paved the way for further progress. In addition to
Babbage’s ideas of breaking complicated calculations down into small operations and the first attempt at programming, and Hollerith bridging the gap
between the mechanical era and the new age of electronic computers, the
work of mathematician George Boole was a key to further development. By means of determining that all mathematical calculations can be stated as either true or false, Boole defined the binary system – to be used by all future computers.
There are three machines which have claimed the title of being the first
electronic computer ever. Instead of using electromechanical relays, they used
fully electronic switches: vacuum tubes. These had one important advantage – they were about a thousand times faster than mechanical switches. They also had one disadvantage: vacuum tube computers were gigantic. This is the most important reason they were replaced by smaller transistors in the 1950s.
In 1941, J. V. Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, and Clifford Berry, a graduate student, designed the first all-electronic computer using Boolean algebra. Although Atanasoff’s machine used such advanced technology as vacuum tubes, it was still more like an electronic calculator than a computer.
It must be said that breakthroughs in the evolution of the computer were in
many cases preceded by breakthroughs in the evolution of the calculator. Very sophisticated calculators were created in the 1930s by Konrad Zuse in Germany. Zuse, who also built computers for the German army in 1943, was one of the first to use Boole’s binary system.
The Colossus, a computer designed by Englishman Alan Turing in 1943
tablet press punch and dieexclusively for breaking German code messages during World War II was a
second machine claiming the title of the first computer.
The third “first computer” was also originally created for military purposes: the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), built by J. P. Eckert and J. V. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania, was to be used for calculating trajectory tables of newly developed weapons. However, the ENIAC was not completed until 1945. Shortly after the war it was used in developing the hydrogen bomb and later for weather prediction, etc. Although the ENIAC weighed some 80 tons and used about 1,800 square feet of floor space, it could store data and was crudely programmable – by wiring certain units of the machine in specific sequences.
Later the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) was ruled the first electronic computer, largely because it w
as the first to use vacuum tubes, even before the ENIAC. The inventors of the ENIAC went on to create the EDVAC, the first computer with a stored program. Since the computer was now capable of storing instructions as well as data, it could function more smoothly and was also faster.
As transistors replaced vacuum tubes in the 1950s, computers began to grow smaller and faster – a process  that continues today.

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