There is a wonderful quote from The Histories by Herodotus where he says: 'I will tell the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those that were great once are small today; and those that in my own lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days'. You could say the same about big data. We have always had big data - data that are so voluminous that they tax our ability to represent them digitally or non-digitally, but as our technologies have improved, the data we had in the past now seem small by comparison with what we can handle today. Digital computers were invented during the war years, simultaneously in the USA, UK and Germany, and by 1945 a handful of big but cumbersome digital devices existed in scientific settings.
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