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What is "big data" anyway? Gigabytes? Terabytes? Petabytes? A brief personal memory may provide some perspective. In the late 1980s at Columbia University I had the chance to play around with what at the time was a truly enormous "disk": the IBM 3850 MSS (Mass Storage System). The MSS was actually a fully automatic robotic tape library and associated staging disks to make random access, if not exactly instantaneous, at least fully transparent. In Columbia’s configuration, it stored a total of around 100 GB. It was already on its way out by the time I got my hands on it, but in its heyday, the early to mid-1980s, it had been used to support access by social scientists to what was unquestionably "big data" at the time: the entire 1980 U.S. Census database.
Adam Jacobs (Wed,) studied this question.