A Brief History of the Abacus...

This is a brief history of the abacus and a Bibliography follows. The earliest counting devices known to man were his own hands and fingers. If that wasn't enough, things in nature were used like shells, twigs, pebbles, stones, and so forth. It is a good idea to think about the history of arithmetic, mathematics, writing and recorded information. Man's invention of the computer resulted from man's need to quantify, to count and to do mathematic calculations. Long before the computer, in the Roman Empire, Ancient Asia, and other parts of the World, man was inventing easier and faster ways of counting and calculating.