Eliae Vineti ... de logistica libri tres

If the ancient Latins had published anything about it that had reached us, we would not be ignorant of the name by which they called it. We would follow them as good authors without hesitation in its naming. But no ancient writing of that kind exists, so we struggle greatly over how we might call the doctrine of computing with a single term. Until a more suitable one emerges from somewhere, let us call it Logistikē together with those Greeks, rather than by the name we said was used by our instructors. Nor should we fear the term Logistikē any more than the ancient Latins were ashamed to borrow the word Arithmetic from those same Greeks. For logos is ratio, and logizesthai is to reason or to compute: whence logistikē was born. Just as arithmos is number, and arithmeisthai is to be numbered: whence arithmētikē proceeded. From the same source, those were called Logistai calculators who knew and exercised Logistikē, who recently began to be called Algoristae those who use algorithms in a barbaric manner, as Guillaume Budé has noted. Whom Marcus Cicero had previously called Ratiocinatores reasoners, and Sidonius Apollinaris, Flavius Vegetius, Valerius Martialis, and others born after Cicero called Calculatores calculators. They fashioned the word calculare for that which is to compute and to reason.

Numerals However, our ancestors expressed numbers not only by voice, writing, notes, pebbles, or similar things, but also by the gesture of fingers and hands, a method explained by the Englishman Bede in his book on the reckoning of time, though it has long since fallen out of use among us. The signs, however, or as they are commonly called, figures, through which we are going to teach Logistikē here, are those signs which we Gauls call Chifras ciphers/digits.