It’s been a while. Hi. I’m Dave, it’s the last day of a week of annual leave from my regular job, and I thought I’d heed the reminder from Buttondown that I haven’t sent an email to this list in over a year, and get back to sending emails. Thanks for sticking around.

-

It may seem that I inject trivia into a conversation within only a few minutes of meeting someone.

Mercifully, the friend who was brokering this particular introduction was happy to frame it as a positive and charming quirk, rather than an unpurchased ticket to watch non-sequitur after non-sequitur.

For some reason we started to talk about the use of an abacus - a simple, human-facing counting tool that requires no power, and doesn’t interface with anything.

The mention of the abacus brought to me some memories of what I’d studied in computer science around computing machines. Even when I was finishing up as an undergraduate, the computers of my childhood were considered old enough to be the subject of a “historical computing” assignment, but this is to go even further back again.

When we were studying historical computing devices, one of the first things to look at was the abacus. We only went as far back as those with beads and wires, but looking at the Britannica entry for the abacus - which tells you the etymology comes from the Greek αβακος (abakos), which comes from the Hebrew word for dust - אָבָק (abaq) - as the original abacus was more of a wooden box that a Babylonian would have some sand in it, so you could draw in the sand. For some reason, this reminds me of the Magna Doodle where being able to make a message somewhat permanent, especially while travelling, was significant.

Over time, the abacus ended up being used only for counting and arithmetic, and so the tech was improved, from sand, to arranging counters.

You can see some pictures of different abaci in this blog post.

The Romans added grooves for the counters, and then other nationalities further refined it, and so wires were used to keep the counters on track.

By the Middle Ages, the abacus had spread out and was more commonplace around the world. Its great enemy was perhaps zero-based notation (Hindu-Arabic numbers), but even there it maintains its strengths as a teaching tool (helping children develop their mental arithmetic), and to be able to work without batteries.

I had misremembered the difference between the Japanese and Chinese abacus, though not that the Japanese one had made interface improvements for faster use.

Both the Chinese “Suanpan” abacus and the Japanese “Soroban” have a frame around the many wire rows, and have each row split into an upper and lower row by the wooden frame that holds all the wires and beads.

The difference is in the number and shape of the beads. The Suanpan has two upper beads and six lower beads, while the Soroban has one upper bead (indicating +5 or 0), and four lower beads (counting up from 0 to 4).

There have been some other developments in making the abacus more accessible to people with a vision impairment; adding extra tactile cues and bumps to make it easier to orient.

Lastly (and in contrast to all the developments in making it more useful), the abacus that I picture when I think of the word is a toy for very young western children. There are no upper/lower distinctions, it just has ten same-coloured beads on each row, and seems more about motor skill development than learning maths.

So that’s the first in a series on “things that count”. I hope you enjoyed learned something alongside me.

What would you include in a list of things that count?