
Listen to your technology users — they have led to the most disruptive innovations in history
In 1971, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor to the modern internet, had about 1,000 users. The @ sign was an obscure symbol. Then, engineer Ray Tomlinson changed everything by creating a system to send messages to other computers on the ARPANET network, using the @ sign to indicate who each message was for. Email was born.