"You’ve never heard of Yuji Ijiri. But back in 1989 he created something incredible.
It’s more revolutionary than the cotton gin, the steam engine, the PC and the smart phone combined.
When people look back hundreds of years from now, only the printing press and the Internet will have it beat for sheer mind-boggling impact on society. Both the net and the printing press enabled the democratization of information and single-handedly uplifted the collective knowledge of people all over the world.
So what am I talking about? What did Ijiri create that’s so amazing?
Triple-entry accounting.
Uh, what?
Yeah. I’m serious.
But don’t feel bad if you slept through the revolution. It wasn’t televised or posted on Reddit. When Professor Ijiri died in 2017, most people didn’t catch his obituary. His most famous book, Momentum Accounting & Triple-Entry Bookkeeping, has a grand total of zero reviews on Good Reads. So you’re not alone if you missed it.
Go ahead and Google “triple-entry accounting” and see what comes up.
232,000 results. In the age of Google that’s like not existing. Minor Instagram celebrities and memes invented last week have more hits.
The number two link is a Wikipedia article that’s barely a stub. The fourth down is a paper from 2005. Ijiri isn’t even mentioned on the first page.
So why is it so important if nobody knows about it?
Because the first application for it didn’t come along until 2008 and so it’s real impact is still to come. But make no mistake, it’s coming like a tsunami that will remake every aspect of our lives and societies.
How do I know?
To understand why, you just need to know a little about history’s sexiest subject."
Read more here: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important-invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169