And they massage your feet while doing so! Although why this post is tagged with abacus instead of soroban is beyond me. Rectifying.

"Soroban" is just Japanese for "abacus", isn't it? Is there really an appreciable difference?

Yes, several in fact.
For one, the orientation: the soroban operates vertically, the Greek abacus horizontally.
The soroban contains five+one beads, while the abacus was, in its purest form, just a tablet that used markers placed onto its surface separately.
The soroban has variable precision, by picking a different post for the unit, one can achieve theoretically infinite decimal precision, while the abacus had its decimal places 'hardcoded', making it difficult to adjust without getting mixed up in the decimals. And so on...

But to be honest, I'm all for curtailing the proliferation of tags, so we might as well call it an abacus. After all, the Greek word means "counting-table", so it can be applied for the soroban too.

I don't even think of a Greek instrument when I hear the term "abacus"—which is silly, I realize, considering the origins of the term. Perhaps it's because this is the only type of abacus I've ever encountered in media, so I've come to think of it as the "standard" form of the object.

Well, personal biases aside, I'm all for avoiding needless tag proliferation myself.

ThunderBird said:
Yes, several in fact.
For one, the orientation: the soroban operates vertically, the Greek abacus horizontally.
The soroban contains five+one beads, while the abacus was, in its purest form, just a tablet that used markers placed onto its surface separately.
The soroban has variable precision, by picking a different post for the unit, one can achieve theoretically infinite decimal precision, while the abacus had its decimal places 'hardcoded', making it difficult to adjust without getting mixed up in the decimals. And so on...

But to be honest, I'm all for curtailing the proliferation of tags, so we might as well call it an abacus. After all, the Greek word means "counting-table", so it can be applied for the soroban too.

So when I was young and took classes I was learning the soroban and not the abacus...

(Accidentally voted down your post :(, anyone care to reverse it?)