A Timeline of Digital Data

A Timeline of Digital Data

Big Data is term which we frequently hear and this blog puts things in perspective and gives us an idea to how ‘BIG’ the data is or has evolved over the years. The amount of digital data has exploded in recent years. It has gone from a molehill to the size of a mountain in terms of numerous applications running and processing data. The data boom is illustrated in this blog in a timeline format showing some of the largest corporate data collections from each decade.

 1950’s -600 Megabytes
John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. was one of the pioneers in digitizing customer information from 2 million life insurance policies on a Univac (Universal Automatic Computer) computing system acquired in 1955.
 1960’s- 807 Megabytes
In the 1960’s American Airlines developed Sabre which is a flight reservation system built using the IBM computing systems. It was one of the first, allowing the airline to keep track of an immense matrix of reservations, flight schedules, seat inventories and so on.
 1970’s-80 Gigabytes
Federal Express worked with a system known as Cosmos which allowed the company to scan and track the large volume of packages being shipped around the world.
 1980’s- 450 Gigabytes
This was the decade where banks were at the forefront of data growth with a developing ATM culture and banks were focused on collecting and transaction data for businesses. Citibank’s NAIB was at the forefront to implement this initiative.
 1990’s- 180 Terabytes
Wal-Mart was a company which grew to become America’s largest in retail and had the biggest commercial data warehouse in the world at that point in time.
 2000’s- 25 Petabytes
The explosion of the internet set the stage for web based companies to emerge as the global leaders in big data. Google was at the forefront of this paving way to many other companies operating web based to work with Big Data.
 2010’s- 100 Petabytes
Facebook has a huge data hoarding which is bigger than Google. Its user content makes up more than 100 petabytes of stored photos and videos. Analyzing this vast amount of data itself generates over 500 terabytes of new information everyday.
Source: The Wall Street Journal