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An abacus (plurals abacuses or abaci), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool for performing arithmetical processes, often constructed as a wooden frame with beads sliding on wires. more...

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The user, called an abacist, slides counters by hand on rods or in grooves. It was in use centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu-Arabic numeral system and is still widely used by merchants and clerks in China, Japan, Africa and elsewhere.

Origins

The first abacus was almost certainly based on a flat stone covered with sand or dust. Words and letters were drawn in the sand; eventually numbers were added and pebbles used to aid calculations. The Babylonians used this dust abacus as early as 2400 BC. The origin of the counter abacus with strings is obscure, but India, Mesopotamia or Egypt are seen as probable points of origin. China played an essential part in the development and evolution of the abacus.

From this, a variety of abaci were developed; the most popular were based on the bi-quinary system, using a combination of two bases (base-2 and base-5) to represent decimal numbers. But the earliest abaci used first in Mesopotamia and later by scribes in Egypt and Greece used sexagesimal numbers represented with factors of 5, 2, 3, and 2 for each digit.

The use of the word abacus dates from before 1387, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from abakos, the Greek genitive form of abax ("calculating-table"). Because abax also had the sense of "table sprinkled with sand or dust, used for drawing geometric figures", some linguists speculate that the Greek word may be derived from a Semitic root, ābāq (pronounced "a-vak"), the Hebrew word for "dust". Though details of the transmission are obscure, it may also be derived from the Phoenician word abak, meaning "sand". The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, but both abacuses and abaci are in use.

Babylonian abacus

Babylonians may have used the abacus for mathematical operations of addition and subtraction. However, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations. Some scholars point to a character from the Babylonian cuniform which may have been derived from a representation of the abacus.

Read more at Wikipedia.org