Abacus

Napiers Bone
Analytical Engine

The Abacus is a
calculating tool used
primarily in parts of
Asia for performing
arithmetic processes. It
is the olden form of a
calculator. Its origin
dates back to 2400 B.C
when the Babylonians
used pebbles and dust
abacus for their
calculations.
Napiers Bone is an abacus created by John
Napier for calculation of products and
quotients of numbers and was based on
Arab mathematics and lattice
multiplication. Using the multiplication
tables embedded in the rods, multiplication
can be reduced to addition operations and
division to subtractions. More advanced use
of the rods can even extract square roots.
The Analytical Engine is a design for a
mechanical general-purpose computer first
described by Charles Babbage in 1837. The
Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetical
unit, control flow in the form of conditional
branching and loops, and integrated memory,
making it the first Turing-complete design for
a general-purpose computer.