Some Highlights of the Development of the Computer from BC to 1950

3000 - 500 BC Abacus Manipulating numbers has been an onerous chore since the development of commerce. Interestingly, the first attempt to automate calculations involved the fingers. The next attempt to solve this problem was the development of the abacus. Whether you find that the inventors were the Greeks and Romans, or the Chinese depends on your source as does the date they first appeared. There is even evidence that late in the first millennium the Aztecs were using an abacus (Fernandes, 1997). Using an abacus a skilled operator could add, subtract, multiply and divide very rapidly. Records show that on November 12, 1946, the champion abacus operator of Japan defeated a man using an electric calculating machine (Kojima, 1997). The abacus, however has several disadvantages over an electric calculator. For one, it requires considerable training. Moreover, the real disadvantage of the abacus is that the operator must perform his calculations mentally. All the abacus does is store the results step by step.