History of Big Data 1

Before computers were created before the 1960's the only method of collecting and recording information from the population was by paper. People would need to manually hand out forms for people to fill out or someone would go round surveying people. It was hard to collect large amounts of information because it takes a lot of people and a lot of time to collate the data as it all had to be done manually. All the data collected was structured and planned ahead eg the questionnaires were written by someone who wanted to find specific information.

During the 1960's the first computers were created. They were mostly inaccessible to the majority of the population as they were very expensive and very large. They were not practical to have as they were hard to use for the average person also. They were only adopted by large companies who could afford them at this time but the computers did not have much use as the technology was not very advanced. Data was still mostly processed by paper manually.

In 1975 the first home PCs were made. Still not many people had them as they were expensive. There was still no internet but information could now more easily be stored electronically in files stored on the computer's local storage. Information was still analysed manually through paper as computers were not mainstream technology yet.

1983 was when the internet was created. Information was beginning to be analysed on the internet however not many people had a connection to internet as it was not mainstream yet. More and more information was being stored in computers though as we moved on from using paper to process data.

From 1995-2000 the internet was growing rapidly with the birth of social media and e-commerce websites. Lots of people were now using the internet and so data was being produced from a lot of people. However there was not a lot of data and it was not very meaningful data. There was no technology yet to be able to make sense of the unstructured data. Data was almost only stored on databases and not paper anymore.

2010-present is when the use of big data and internet has really exploded. Now we are giving information unconsciously just by using the internet especially through social media and online shopping. Everything we do on the internet can be analysed with technology like Hadoop. Most data collected from people is unstructured data and 3.2 billion people on the planet use the internet meaning there is so much information which can be analysed. Almost nothing is stored or processed using paper - computer, mobile and internet technology has almost completely eliminated the need to use paper.