The Abacus was invented in the 25th century BC by the Mesopotamians who needed a device to help them calculate addition and subtraction problems. It was slightly different from abacuses today, because it worked on a base-6 counting system, but the same basic principal was behind it. The abacus later became obsolete around 1620-1630, with the invention of an amazing high tech calculation device known as a slide rule, which unlike the abacus, could be used to solve multiplication and division problems, and which itself became obsolete in 1961 with the advent of the desktop electric calculator, which was replaced by the pocket electric calculator in 1970.
However, in November of 1997, IBM scientists will WAY too much time on their hands made even this obsolete with the invention of. . . the abacus?
Alright, maybe they didn't make the pocket electric calculator obsolete, but they did re-invent the abacus for no clear reason. And since anyone who knows anything about modern technology (which the abacus is not) will tell you "smaller is better", they decided to kick it up a notch, and build an abacus less then micrometer (that's one one-millionth of a meter) long, with beads smaller than one nanometer (that's one one-billionth of a meter). In order to push the beads (actually tiny, soccer ball shaped buckminsterfullerene molecules known as bucky balls), around in their little slots (because its too small to use those little bars) you need to use a needle with a tip only one atom wide, and in order for you to see what you're doing, you need an instrument called a scanning tunneling microscope (or STM), which fortunately comes with a needle with a one atom wide tip attached to it.
All in all, this atomic abacus seems like less of a revolutionary new technology, and more like a "look what I can do!" Sure, George Mallory may have made is famous climb of Mt. Everest "because it's there," but you have to take into consideration that the face of Everest is littered with 179 frozen corpses who also climbed Mt. Everest "because it was there," and never came back from "there".
I'm not saying making an atomic abacus can get you killed. I'm just saying that they most likely came up with the idea while they were just about as wasted as the effort that went into the project.
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