Abacus lives!

Computers are supposedly great at crunching number, right? Apparently, so are people. This Wikipedia article describes soroban, a Japanese version of abacus. There was reportedly a competition held to compare the accuracy and speed of doing basic arithmetic calculations with an electronic calculator vs. the soroban. The winner? Soroban 4 to 1! The article does not explain the details, but it's safe to assume, since electronic calculations usually take no time at all, it's the time taken to enter an expression into the calculator that slows down the process.