Chinese abacus

The earliest known written documentation of the Chinese abacus dates to the 2nd century BC.^[14]

The Chinese abacus, known as the suànpán(算盤, lit. "Counting tray"), is typically 20 cm (8 in) tall and comes in various widths depending on the operator. It usually has more than seven rods. There are two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads each in the bottom for both decimal and hexadecimalcomputation. The beads are usually rounded and made of a hardwood. The beads are counted by moving them up or down towards the beam. If you move them toward the beam, you count their value. If you move away, you don't count their value.^[15] The suanpan can be reset to the starting position instantly by a quick jerk along the horizontal axis to spin all the beads away from the horizontal beam at the center.

Suanpans can be used for functions other than counting. Unlike the simple counting board used in elementary schools, very efficient suanpan techniques have been developed to do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cube root operations at high speed. There currently are schools teaching students how to use it.

In the famous long scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival painted by Zhang Zeduan (1085–1145 AD) during the Song Dynasty(960–1297 AD), a suanpan is clearly seen lying beside an account book and doctor's prescriptions on the counter of an apothecary's (Feibao).

The similarity of the Roman abacus to the Chinese one suggests that one could have inspired the other, as there is some evidence of a trade relationship between the Roman Empire and China. However, no direct connection can be demonstrated, and the similarity of the abaci may be coincidental, both ultimately arising from counting with five fingers per hand. Where the Roman model (like most modern Japanese) has 4 plus 1 bead per decimal place, the standard suanpan has 5 plus 2, allowing use with a hexadecimal numeral system. Instead of running on wires as in the Chinese and Japanese models, the beads of Roman model run in grooves, presumably making arithmetic calculations much slower.

Another possible source of the suanpan is Chinese counting rods, which operated with a decimal system but lacked the concept of zero as a place holder. The zero was probably introduced to the Chinese in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) when travel in the Indian Ocean and theMiddle East would have provided direct contact with India, allowing them to acquire the concept of zero and the decimal point from Indian merchants and mathematicians.

History of Computer

Abacus is the first calculating device.Mathematical concepts and their offspring, arithmetical operations, were considered for thousands of years a pure intellectual exercise which could not be duplicated or performed by a man-made artifact. Even the Abacus which appeared in Asia Minor 2500 years ago and is still in use today, is only a memory-helping device rather than a real calculating machine.

The Abacus is an ingenious counting device based on the relative positions of two sets of beads moving on parallel strings. The first set contains five beads on each string and allows counting from 1 to 5, while the second set has only two beads per string representing the numbers 5 and 10. The Abacus system seems to be based on a radix of five. Using a radix of five makes sense since humans started counting objects on their fingers.

he normal method of calculation in ancient Rome, as in Greece, was by moving counters on a smooth table. Originally pebbles, calculi, were used. Later, and in medieval Europe, jetons were manufactured. Marked lines indicated units, fives, tens etc. as in the Roman numeral system. This system of 'counter casting' continued into the late Roman empire and in medieval Europe, and persisted in limited use into the nineteenth century.^[12]

Writing in the 1st century BC, Horace refers to the wax abacus, a board covered with a thin layer of black wax on which columns and figures were inscribed using a stylus.^[13]

One example of archaeological evidence of the Roman abacus, shown here in reconstruction, dates to the 1st century AD. It has eight long grooves containing up to five beads in each and eight shorter grooves having either one or no beads in each. The groove marked I indicates units, X tens, and so on up to millions. The beads in the shorter grooves denote fives – five units, five tens etc., essentially in a bi-quinary coded decimal system, obviously related to theRoman numerals. The short grooves on the right may have been used for marking Roman

Defination of Computer

A programmable machine. The two principal characteristics of a computer are:

It responds to a specific set of instructions in a well-defined manner.

• It can excute a prerecorded list of instructions (a program).

computer is an electronic device that is able to process and retain information when programmed.

A computer is an electronic device that operates under the control of a set of instructions that is stored in its memory unit.

A computer accepts data from an input device and processes it into useful information which it displays on its output device.