Quotes & Sayings About Abacus

The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines. — William H. Whyte

If you look through the history of wearables, I was named the father of wearable computing, or the world's first cyborg. But the definition of wearable computing can be kind of fuzzy itself. Thousands of years ago, in China, people would wear an abacus around their neck - that, in one sense, was a wearable computer. — Steve Mann

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus. — Peter S. Prescott

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease. — Meg Wolitzer

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.
- Rothchild's Fiddle — Anton Chekhov

If you imagine the difference between an abacus and the world's fastest supercomputer, you would still not have the barest inkling of how much more powerful a quantum computer could be compared with the computers we have today. — Marcus Chown

fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable. My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator. — Pearl Fichman

To look after a medieval estate, one required a map, an indexed account book and an abacus. For its time, this was a highly sophisticated geographical information system. Looking after the earth and each of its parts requires more data, a better index and more data processing. — Tom Turner

The human brain has the computational efficiency of 10^-26. You are an abacus of horse guts and shiny beads beside me. You do not understand. Cannot comprehend. And I have no time to bend the meat inside your skull and make it grasp the simple truth that still somehow eludes you. — Amie Kaufman

We dwell amid pinheaded weasels who know only timid, the generic and the abacus. — Danny Baker

He described the securities - called Abacus - to a girlfriend: I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself 'Well, what if we created a "thing," which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?').15 — John Kay

Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. — Hilary Mantel

Underlying all this activity - in the customhouses, on the wharves, in every place of business - were numbers. Merchants measured out their wares and negotiated prices; customs officers calculated taxes to be levied on imports; scribes and stewards prepared ships' manifests, recording the values in long columns using Roman numerals. They would have put their writing implements to one side and used either their fingers or a physical abacus to perform the additions, then picked up pen and parchment once again to enter the subtotals from each page on a final page at the end. With no record of the computation itself, if anyone questioned the answer, the entire process would have to be repeated. — Keith J. Devlin

Dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field ... — John Geddes

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus. — Dan Chaon

I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus. — Jan Koum

I remain fundamentally optimistic about
Wall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Its
future will rightly depend on several variables, chief among them
being human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectively
or objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that if
it could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about how
to use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad of
reasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity,
anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East and
Asian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduring
example of mutual consensus. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring . — Jacob Bronowski

All right. Here's the deal. You're eight," he said. "I'm nine," I said. "Do I look like I carry an abacus with your name on it? Cut me some slack here, son. — Justin Halpern

I have an abacus at home. — Conan O'Brien

Turning to Ann Gower, she smiled. "You're a good woman, Ann Gower."
Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. "Don't you go ruinin' me reputation, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore, and you knows it! — Bryce Courtenay