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How did the Pascaline differ from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnizâs Step Reckoner?
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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal, oil painting by an anonymous artist, c. 1650; in the MusĂ©e CarnavaletâHistoire de Paris, Paris. Pascal laid the foundation for probability theory.
The Pascaline, designed by Blaise Pascal between 1642 and 1644, was limited to performing addition and subtraction by manipulating its dials.12
In contrast, the Step Reckoner, designed by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz in 1671, expanded upon Pascalâs concepts by enabling multiplication through a process of repeated addition and shifting. While Leibniz was a strong advocate for the binary number system, his machine did not utilize it; instead, like the Pascaline, the Step Reckoner represented numbers in decimal form using 10-position dials.23