lookin' good

[Charles Hallenbeck]

> A 21-rod abacus?! Hey, now that's cool! Only ones I've ever seen were
> of the 13-rod variety.
I guess this was a double precision item! <smile> Actually you could do
separate problems on different regions of it - sort of like opening
another console on Linux!

The Chinese abacus with 5+2 beads is not hex, just decimal. You can
postpone the carry that way, although I am not sure any more why you would
want to do that. I bought that thing in a Chinese restaurant in Cleveland
which also did imports, and it came with an instruction manual written in
a kind of pigeon English that was right out of an old Charlie Chan movie -
a real riot.

With all those rods I guess you could call it a Fortran machine!

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