In the beginning

For thousands of years, humans have needed to count. Families needed to know how many animals, how much food and how much land they had. This information was important when people wanted to buy and sell things, and also when people died or got married. There were many different ways to count and write down the numbers. The Sumerians had three different ways: they used one for land, one for fruit and vegetables, and one for animals. They could count, but they had no easy way to do calculations.

Around 1900 to 1800 BC, the Babylonians invented a new way to count which used place values. This meant that two things decided the size of a number: the digits and their position. Today, we still use place values to count. We can write any number using only ten digits (0-9). Computers also use place values when they do calculations. They only use two digits (0 and 1).

Between 1000 and 500 BC, the Babylonians invented the abacus. It used small stones which they put in lines. Each line of stones showed a different place value. To do calculations they moved stones from one line to another. Later, different kinds of abacuses were made. Some of them were made of wood and used coloured balls. It is also possible that the abacus was first invented in China, but nobody really knows.

Although an abacus can be very fast, it is not really a machine because it does not do calculations automatically. In the seventeenth century, people began to build calculating machines. In 1640, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal made an Arithmetic Machine. He used it to count money. During the next ten years,

Pascal made fifty more machines.

In the 1670s, a German called Leibnitz continued Pascal’s work and made a better machine. It could do more difficult calculations. Interestingly, Leibnitz’s machine only used two digits (0 and 1) for doing calculations – just like modern computers! In fact, calculating machines like Leibnitz’s machine were used for the next three hundred years, until cheap computers began to appear.

(from Information Technology by Paul A.Davies, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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