Last week, I wrote a guest blog post for the accounting news website Going Concern. The post centered on an old accounting book (circa. 1968) that I happened upon in a used book store up in British Columbia’s version of Cottage Country.
Reviewing this relic got me wondering about what technology might have accompanied the practice of accounting detailed in the book.
Ready?
Here it is guys:
And:
That’s it.
But where the principles of accounting have remained substantially unchanged over the course of the intervening years, the same cannot be said for business technology.
According to the timeline provided on www.oldcalculatormuseum.com, the development of electronic calculators really only just started to take off around 1961 (you can thank the invention of the integrated circuit - the microchip). This was BRAND NEW technology. Previous calculator technology had been manual.
Manual Calculator; Photo: Christos Vittoratos (via Wikimedia Commons)
By the time this book was written, there were a dozen companies creating and innovating new models and the competition to capture the new market was fierce. Casio, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Canon, and of course Hewlett Packard; all of these guys were battling it out. Numerous others are buried in technology’s graveyard.
Needless to say, things have never been the same since.
Accounting and business reporting as we know it today has grown from the roots of this technological revolution.
Business technology has continued to grow by leaps and bounds since that time, but don’t be fooled into thinking there’s no room left to branch out. The fact you are on our website leads me to believe you’re at least willing to entertain the notion of continuing innovation in business technology. Safe to assume?
The reason behind this little trip down Memory Lane is that everyday here at Indicee, as we innovate for the future, we can’t help but bump up against the past. Not the ancient history I’ve outlined above, we’re confronting the incumbent technology. We’re confronting the stuff that is likely downloaded on your machine today.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the value an innovation like the electronic calculator brought to the workplace. It’s easy to look back and immediately recognize how important this innovation was for business. Had you been there at that time, you would have jumped on it! Would you not? You would have jumped on it and tossed your old, manual calculator in the first dumpster you could find! Right?
Yet, this sort of reaction is rarely the case when new technologies come to market, isn’t it? When new technologies show up isn’t there normally a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)? Isn’t there normally a great deal of resistance to change?
What’s your view?
