MECHANICAL COUNTING AND CALCULATING DEVICES
As a result of the disadvantages of the early counting devices, more advanced mechanical counting and calculating devices were invented. Some of these devices are;
- Abacus (Chinese)
- Napier’s Bone (John Napier)
- Slide Rule (William Oughtred)
- The Abacus: Abacus is a manual calculating or counting device which uses beads instead of fingers to represent numbers. The beads are strung in rows, each containing ten beads representing the ten fingers. The abacus was used majorly for addition and subtraction. It could not carry out complex mathematics.
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