History of computing
The earliest reference of the term computer comes from the French word of the same in 1631, derived from the Latin word computare meaning "to count, to sum up". The word is formed from the two roots com- "with", +putare "to reckon"(originally "to prune")[1].
Early Methods of Counting (300 - 1200 A.D.)
Before the arrival of mechanical or analogue computing, ancient civilizations required methods to quantify properties of their livelihoods. Circa 300 B.C., the Slamis Tablet[2], discovered on the island of Salamis in 1846, was used by the Babylonians to track numbers in their society.
Development of counting techniques lead to devices like the Roman hand abacus, which is estimated to have been created some time between 300 B.C. and 500 A.D. The addition of a top and bottom row of grooves where round beads were used to indicate values lead the evolution to the suan-pan, or Chinese abacus, around 1200 A.D. that closely resembles the abacus of today. In the typical modern-day abacus, slidable markers are placed on columns of shafts representing powers of ten (.0001, .001, .01, .1, 1, 10, 100 etc), with the top row representing values of "fives" and the bottom representing values of "ones".
References
- ↑ "compute", Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved on 2007-04-24.
- ↑ The Abacus:A Brief History. Retrieved on 2007-04-24.