I remember manually plugging 16kB (that’s right “kilobyte”) memory chips into an original IBM Personal Computer. The crunching sound they made was unforgettable. I was ecstatic that I had increased the total memory to 128kB, and then to 256kB … WOW! At that time that was a lot of memory. Who could ever need to store that much data? That was “Big Data“.
Let’s fast forward to today. The memory on your handheld smartphone and other devices is measured in Gigabytes (GB). Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are generated every day. Every move, every transaction, every image, every event and every location in everyone’s lives are recorded.
That is Big Data!
Continue reading “What is Big Data?”