@copperbadge this seems up your alley
If the system ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess! Accounting may not be the oldest profession, but someone had to keep the books for them.
I mean, in theory I know that Excel is based on the structure of earlier accounting technology that's been around for hundreds of years -- what do we think we did to track commerce before computers? -- but it still kind of blows my mind to, for example, look at my ancestor's journal from a whaling voyage in 1770 and see spreadsheets in the back.
According to the book I'm reading, proto-Cuneiform writing seems to have actually started as spreadsheets to keep track of resources rather than as a way to record language or express ideas.
The administrators of that extremely early city had to keep track of lots of things, and doing this by memory alone was a nightmare. These spreadsheets were devised as a solution to that as an evolution of an earlier system that used clay tokens and balls.
Spreadsheets are older than written language as we currently understand it.
