Without order, there is chaos – Luca Pacioli
Prior to the middle ages there were no widely used standards for record keeping. Records were chaotic and untrustworthy. In 1494, the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli introduced a standardized system that created order. This system included double-entry bookeekping and became the basis of modern accounting.
Accountants kept records in manual ledgers. Physical security and handwritten controls limited access and changes. This was the norm for hundreds of years, however the manual ledgers could not scale easily.
The electronic age solved the scale problem by enabling automation. This reduced human input but introduced the agency problem ... continued.