Читать книгу Laptops For Dummies - Dan Gookin - Страница 13

Long before people marveled over credit-card-size calculators, merchants and goatherds used the world's first portable calculator. Presenting the abacus, the device used for centuries to rapidly perform calculations that would otherwise induce painful headaches.

Abacus comes from the Greek word meaning “to swindle you faster.” Seriously, the abacus, or counting board, is simple to master. Schoolkids today learn to use the abacus as a diversion from more important studies. In the deft hands of an expert, an abacus can perform all the same operations as a calculator — including square roots and cubic roots.

In his short story Into the Comet, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote of stranded astronauts using many abacuses to plot their voyage home when the spaceship's computer wouldn’t work because the Internet was down and their version of Windows couldn’t be validated.