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... fall when the use of paper and pencil spread particularly throughout Europe, its importance diminished. The next significant advance of computing started with a man named Blaise Pascal, nearly twelve centuries ensuing the invention of the Abacus. Pascal was an eighteen year-old son of a French tax collector in the early seventeenth century. To ameliorate his father's duties, Pascal assembled a brass rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, using eight movable dials capable of adding sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's system is all based upon the number ten. For example, as one dial passed nine, the next dial turned to represent one in the tens column as the original dial returned back to zero. The Pascaline's only drawback was its limitation to addition. A German mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz improved the Pascaline in 1694 by inventing a machine with the ability to not only ...