WHAT IS AN ABACUS ?

An Abacus is a calculation tool, generally comprising of a wooden frame with beads mounted on wires. These can be conveniently slided on the wires of the wooden frame. It was primarily used centuries ago, long before the discovery and the consequent adoption of the written arabic numeral system and is still widely used by the merchants of China, central Asia and other locations. The word Nepohualtzintzin comes from the Nahuatl and it is formed by the roots; Ne - personal -; pohual or pohualli - the account -; and tzintzin - small similar elements

Abacus is arguably the forefather of a modern day computer or it can be perceived as the first computer invented by the mankind. Abacus was invented as early as 1220 A.D. in the west coast of China. Every ancient civilization in the world was familiar if not expert when it came to the usage of the abacus. It was invented in China and slowly but surely spread among the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Japanese and India.

The Abacus used in our programme is a Japanese soroban. It has got 17 rods .There is one bead on each rod in the upper deck and four beads each in the bottom for both decimal and hexadecimal computation. The beads on the abacus are usually shaped as a double cone (bi-cone) to facilitate ease of movement. The beads are counted by moving them up or down towards the beam. The abacus can be reset to the starting position instantly by a quick jerk along the horizontal axis to align all the beads away from the horizontal beam at the center.