Did you know that the term 'computer' was first attributed to people instead of machines? Computer was used to describe a job that was predominantly assigned to women. These lady “computers” were tasked to perform repetitive calculations on tide charts, navigational tables, and planetary positions. These women played very important roles in sea and air navigation, not to mention astronomy and weather forecasting. Yet they always viewed their jobs as extremely repetitive and tedious. Boredom and fatigue often made these women careless and prone to mistakes.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of all inventions. To address the work-related issues of “women computers”, Inventors searched for many years for a way to hasten these calculations and make them machine-driven and not human-dependent.

Devices to aid computation were invented and have changed from ordinary recording to counting devices like the abacus, logarithms, and the more recent electronic computers. Early forms of electronic computers were actually the size of large room and consumed so much energy. These first-generation machines were not handy and surely not considered energy-efficient.

Succeeding generations of computers became a tools not only for computing but were designed to perform other functions. Through a program, which is a collection of instructions that tells a computer what to do, the computers were utilized for various types of office work. Usual programs include word processing programs that are used to type, correct, and edit text formats like letters, memos, reports, and other written materials. Spreadsheet programs enables users to perform tasks into a table and calculate and fill-in the rest of the table. This kind of program is usually used to prepare budgets, balance a checkbook, or keep track of investments. Today's computers comes in laptops and hand-held organizers or PDAs --- gadgets that are portable and multi-functional.

The advent of the Internet further enhanced the capabilities of the computer. The Internet allows people from different parts of the world to be connected through e-mail, on-line video streaming, and audio transmissions. Search engines allowed people enormous access to volumes of information about hundreds if not thousands of topics and fields of learning. The Computer, with the powers of the Internet, revolutionized the way of doing business. It enabled business people to communicate despite the long distance. Transactions became more swift and efficient because of e-mails and lately, Internet faxing.

The companies and business professionals of the 21st century actually prefer Internet faxing, ditching the traditional faxing methods that have become costly and inefficient. The new Net-based fax technology is less costly because it does not require an additional appliance and phone line. It also frees consumers of purchasing paper, ink, and other necessary materials. Internet faxing consumes less time because consumers don't need to wait for minutes for a fax to arrive. Anytime of the day, faxes can be sent since Internet faxing is active for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

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