CS378W, History of Computing
Week 2, Weekly Report
Due 2004 Sep 2

Beginning of Computing: The Abacus and a Personal History
Bryant Tang
2004 Sep 2

Computing in this day and age has come a long way since the early days where the prevalence of such advanced devices would have been inconceivable to most. However, what most people do not realize is that the beginning of computing stretches back to humanity's earliest days. Even the most modern of computers is no more than a very complex calculator, a device that has roots in the simple abacus.

The predecessor of the abacus seen in both Asia and Europe was the counting board, a tool that utilized beads or other counters that were slid across grooves in a piece of wood, while the abacus had free-sliding beads (3). The most primitive example was a Babylonian board discovered in 1846 that was named the Salamis tablet (3). It eventually evolved into the abacus, which derives its name from the Greek word abax, which means "table" (3). The next revision of the abacus was the Roman abacus, which first made an appearance around 300 B.C. and featured "a bi-quinary coded decimal system" (2). Typically built from stone or metal (3), beads were moved vertically to mark values. However, this rendition was substantially different from what was to come later.

What we have come to know today as the common abacus originated in China. Called the Suan Pan (meaning "calculating plate"), it debuted in the Yuan Dynasty (14th century) (1). It can be used for functions besides the simplest of mathematical functions - counting, with more complex procedures like multiplication, division, addition, subtraction and roots being within the realm of functions that could be sped up with use of the Chinese abacus (2). It is useful in that the calculations performed are "immediate, retaining the results in visual storage" (1), meaning that the results can be read off the abacus straight away. As such, it was the calculating device of choice in that era, till the rise of modern electronics. It is not clear as to how the early counting board and the Roman abacus is related to the Suan Pan, but one possibility is that the concept of the counting board was brought into China as a result of contact between the early civilizations and the cross-pollination of cultures, resulting in the refined and vastly more powerful Chinese abacus.

However, in recent times, the abacus has become outmoded as a result of the advent of electronic calculators (2). Though the use of such an outdated device may not be common in modern society, there are still shopkeepers and vendors who use the abacus, especially in places where electrical power is not easily available (1). It may be sufficient for simple calculations, but the need for the computation of more advanced functions that are impossible to do with the abacus may explain its redundancy in this complex age of numbers and functions.

Despite its simplistic design, the abacus has helped to usher in an era of high speed computation, driven forward each day by new technologies. As a stepping stone on which modern computers are based upon, it it important that we understand the significance of this device as well as its place in computing history.

I first came into contact with computers at the tender age of five. My father had bought an IBM-compatible 386 computer that ran at the then-fast speed of 30 MHz (a figure that's surpassed by the processors within today's PDAs and mobile phones!). I remember being intrigued at the beige box that caused magical numbers and symbols to flash across the attached monitor. According to my parents, that curiosity led me to conduct a full page-by-page inspection of the DOS manual that came with the PC, the beginning of a love for computers that has brought me to where I am today.

As far as exposure to actual programming goes, it wasn't until I was in middle school that I got my first look at writing a computer program. The class taught us QBasic, a programming language that was geared towards teaching neophytes like me about the basic procedures in computer programming. It was an experience that was soon followed up by my first "real world" programming language in high school - plain old C, which wasn't nearly quite as user-friendly as QBasic was, but it was a lot more flexible and powerful as far as the applications that could be created with it.

Notes

1. "Chinese Culture: Abacus," http://qi-journal.com/culture.asp?-token.SearchID=Abacus (Qi Journal, accessed 2004 Sep 1).

2. "Abacus," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus (Wikipedia, accessed 2004 Sep 1).

3. Luis Fernandes, "A Brief History of the Abacus," http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacus/history.html (Abacus, the Art of Calculating With Beads, accessed 2004 Sep 1).