English: In the figure we have added 7 + 7 (a and b) with a primitive abacus, and 14, the result, is shown as a cluttered table full of counters (c). We can replace some of these counters with a physically different one that has a higher value assigned, for example 10 (the replacement value). With this, the state of our abacus is easier to interpret (d), it has been simplified as 10 1-counters have been replaced by only one 10-counter. Alternatively, we can consider the abacus divided into two spatial regions and use identical counters to which we will associate one value or another according to the region in which we place it. At (e) in the figure above, the abacus has been divided into two regions, left and right separated by the double vertical line. If we assign a value of one to the counters located on the right and 10 to the ones located on the left, the number 14 would be represented as illustrated. This way of proceeding is preferable to the previous one since we can repeat the process, defining as many regions as we need with the replacement values that suit us, allowing us to represent arbitrarily large numbers with counters of a single type, for example, in (f) we have depicted 114 using three regions and two replacement values of 10; we only needed 6 counters. We are witnessing here the birth of Positional notation.