For several hundred years after the introduction into Europe, possibly in the beginning of the 8th century or earlierl, of the Hindu-Arabic numera. system, there existed a controversy over its use for accounting purposesl The proponents for the new system were called Algorists and those who defended the older Roman numeral system were called Abacists. Both factions had staunch supporters and even as late as the beginning of the sixteenth century a book on mathematics2 contained the woodcut (Fig. 1) showing Pythagoras calculating with the aid of the abacus and Boethius using Hindu-Arabic numerals "in the modern method."