In their earliest designs, the rows of beads could be loose on a flat surface or sliding in grooves. One of the two numbers is set up, and the beads are manipulated to perform an operation such as addition, or even a square or cubic root. It consists of rows of movable beads, or similar objects, strung on a wire. The exact origin of the abacus has not yet emerged. It was used in the ancient Near East, Europe, China, and Russia, millennia before the adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The abacus ( plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool which has been used since ancient times.
There was keen competition between the two from the introduction of the Algebra into Europe in the 12th century until its triumph in the 16th. The woodcut shows Arithmetica instructing an algorist and an abacist (inaccurately represented as Boethius and Pythagoras). Calculating-Table by Gregor Reisch: Margarita Philosophica, 1503.
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