The Abacus

The abacus is really just a neat little piece of technology. I mean, think about it for a moment: it's a counting device for base-10 counting. If you're a coder, you've studied binary, octal, and hex [base 2, 8, and 16 -- note please, that the latter two are derivative of base 2], and you probably learned various little notation tricks [or came up with some] to make it easier. Same concept here.

I own a 2/5 abacus. What that means is that my abacus -- a frame holding many dowels with beads on them, is split into an "upper" and "lower" deck, so that the beads on each dowel are divided into a group of 5 and a group of 2. This then enables me to count by ones, where each upper bead represents a five, and each lower bead is just a one. Then, from right to left, the upper deck beads work like base-10 notation, settling into columns: 0s, 10s, 100s, 1000s. So that if I want to represent "10" on my abacus, only one bead, from the correct column [the 10s column] is used.

Fascinating. The thing I find so absorbing is that this is a piece of technology invented to make it easier to count on your fingers. I mean, really. It's the next logical step from finger counting when finger counting stopped being good enough. If you were counting to a hundred on your fingers, you'd have to mark every cycle through 10, right? However you chose to do it. Same thing here. So mark your counting with beads. Of course, it gets more complicated, and I sure don't know how to use mine, but I just think they're cool. Here's this technology -- this idea of a counting aid -- that's been around for literally thousands of years, and people still use a variation of 'em today. That is staying power, my friends.

Odd to Note: We always had an abacus in my house, and one of the first things I consciously did when I was living on my own AND had actual money, was buy an abacus so my home would feel...well, like home.