Open ERP

The Open Source ERP Guru put together an informative history of ERP applications: ERP History | Open Source ERP Guru

It all began with 5 IBM engineers from Manheim, Germany , working nights and weekends on the next big thing in software: ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. The year was 1972, and the business software world was a spaghetti of systems, vendors and technologies. Departments could not communicate with each other because their software systems spoke different languages. Babel tower of custom applications. SAP was about to change everything.

They even have a Flash-based history timeline. Go check it out!