> 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! Visit me at http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The Moon is New
