The abacus has a long history in China and Japan, where it is known as the soroban. Most elderly people in Japan learned to use the soroban in primary school, and many younger Japanese have also studied this at private soroban schools where the subject is taught using a large (about 1 meter wide) soroban that is mounted on a blackboard so that everyone can see it.

The origin of the soroban is believed to be in the Middle East before the beginning of the Christian era. The soroban used in Japan and China both have a horizontal bar, but the Chinese version has two beads above and five beads below the bar in each column and the one used in Japan has one bead above and four beads below.

Large slide rules were also used as teaching aids in colleges and high schools. The slide rule first came into use around 1630 for multiplication and division using logarithms, which had been discovered by John Napier in 1614 and proved very useful in astronomical navigation.

Before the Braun tube came into use, there was a need for some way to explain electrical phenomena such as alternating currents and voice waveforms in a way that students could truly visualize and understand these phenomena. Consequently, special measuring instruments like the instructional oscillograph were used that enabled a group of students to see voice waveforms from the deflection of a galvanometer that was hooked up to a microphone.