Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Email, one of the most popular uses of business computers of all time, was invented in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. He knew that what he was pioneering would become a very useful tool. That was, of course, why he was working on it in the first place, It has spread from its humble beginnings in a small offices in Cambridge, MA into the most ubiquitous computer application of all time.

Tomlinson, however, did not look into his crystal ball and see one of the other consequences of his invention: Spam!  As Tomlinson says, “At that time, the number of people who used e-mail was very small - maybe between 500 to 1,000. So if you were getting spam, you'd know who was sending it. You'd be able to say to them: that's not a good thing to do. It was only when e-mail came to be widely used that the possibility of sending a message anonymously emerged."

Email was first used for rapid communication among user of ARPANET, which was developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense which is actually the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network of the US Department of Defense, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.