History of Big Data

History of Big Data

Early History

When we think of Big data, we think about the overwhelming amounts of data that are collected and stored today. But the idea of big data has actually been around a lot longer that that. Most people believe the term first became popular in the 1990s with some crediting American computer scientist John Mashey with coining the term. Before this however the first data centre had already been built a couple of decades prior in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania ENIAC the world’s first general purpose digital computer. 

World Wide Web and Internet

With the development of the world wide web and internet in early 90s, data became much more accessible, and the opportunity to use data as a tool started to present itself. Companies realised they could collect and analyse commercial customer data, and use it to build customer profiles based on their behaviour.   

2000s and Web 2.0

Into the early 2000s the term big data became more common as well as the first ideas of Volume Velocity and Variety. But it wasn’t until the introduction of Web 2.0 and user created applications that generated a wealth of web content big data really started to take off. Apache Hadoop, a type of open-source software was created in 2005 by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella for data processing.

Recent History

Recently we have seen more and more data being collected on everything in our daily lives. Today powerful AI machine learning tools are used to analyse this data providing companies with invaluable information.