Grandpa today taught my son how to use the abacus, something I do not know how to do. My son was so excited he eagerly showed Mom when she got home. He knows how to move the beads to represent certain numbers without being able to use those numbers to perform calculations. But that is still more than what I can do.
The abacus represents "old" technology. New technology is calculators and computers. But new technology does not just appear out of thin air. The old leads to the new. The past shapes the present. What came before determines what is. So the old is the precursor to new. The abacus, then, was a prior stage in the development of what we have now.
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