A fascinating look at the relationship of accounting, art, and technology, from the time of the Phoenicians to current day. Inspired by an exhibition of enormous quipus by the artist Cecilia Vicuña at the Tate Museum, the author describes how accounting needs nurtured advances in record keeping technologies that gave us the alphabet and the quipu. The wonder of these technologies is how they enabled so much more than the accounting that inspired them. The essay also explores how the interplay between the arts and technology led to the invention of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.