You can always count on the abacus

What will technology do to the abacus, that device with slats of wood housing bars of countable balls that pushed the emergence of currency over barter? I recently spoke to a friend who remembered way back when - 20 years ago - a pocket calculator about the size of a chunky 1980s mobile phone cost US$125, which if converted to today's dollars is a lot.

'Now they are tiny little things that are given away for promotions at banks and fast food stores,' he said.

But technology is not fail-safe. Remember when the Intel chip was a millipoint off, distorting complex calculations in the long run? The abacus does not have this problem. It suffers only from its user's own lack of brain power.

If a ball breaks, rots or falls off, it is easily replaced at little cost.

The abacus is alive and well throughout Asia and no more so than in Hong Kong. But just to the north of California's Silicon Valley, the world's technological heartland, the abacus is in constant use in San Francisco's Chinatown.

One San Francisco resident said: 'You buy something and the young son rings it up on his hi-tech machine and his grandfather sits in the back and checks it with his abacus.' And with good reason. In 1946, a United States calculating machine took on the Japanese abacus and suffered a decisive loss. The ancient device was better at adding, subtracting and dividing, its only weakness being in multiplication.

Historians claim the abacus - in dust format - made its first appearance close to 5,000 years ago in 3,000 BC, probably in Babylonia.