Humans have been whining about being bombarded with too much information since the advent of clay tablets. The complaint in Ecclesiastes that "of making many books there is no end" resonated in the Renaissance, when the invention of the printing press flooded Western Europe with what an alarmed Erasmus called "swarms of new books." But the digital revolution -- with its ever-growing horde of sensors, digital devices, corporate databases, and social media sites -- has been a game-changer, with 90 percent of the data in the world today created in the last two years alone. In response, everyone from marketers to policymakers has begun embracing a loosely defined term for today's massive data sets and the challenges they present: Big Data. While today's information deluge has enabled governments to improve security and public services, it has also sowed fears that Big Data is just another euphemism for Big Brother.
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1887-1890
American
statistician Herman Hollerith invents an electric machine that reads holes
punched into paper cards to tabulate 1890 census data, revolutionizing the
concept of a national head count, which had originated with the Babylonians in
3800 B.C. The device, which enables the United States to complete its census in
one year instead of eight, spreads globally as the age of modern data
processing begins.
1935-1937
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Social Security Act launches the U.S. government on its
most ambitious data-gathering project ever, as IBM
wins a government contract to keep employment records on 26 million working
Americans and 3 million employers. "Imagine the vast army of clerks which will
be necessary to keep these records," Republican presidential candidate Alf
Landon scoffs. "Another army of field investigators will be necessary to check
up on the people whose records are not clear."
1943
At Bletchley Park, a
British facility dedicated to breaking Nazi codes during World War II, engineers develop a series of
groundbreaking mass data-processing machines, culminating in the first programmable electronic computer.
The device, named "Colossus," searches for patterns in intercepted messages by
reading paper tape at 5,000 characters per second -- reducing a process that had
previously taken weeks to a matter of hours. Deciphered information on German
troop formations later helps the Allies during their D-Day invasion.
1961
The U.S. National Security
Agency (NSA), a nine-year-old
intelligence agency with more than 12,000 cryptologists, confronts information
overload during the espionage-saturated Cold War, as it begins collecting and
processing signals intelligence automatically with computers while struggling
to digitize a backlog of records stored on analog magnetic tape in warehouses.
(In July 1961 alone, the agency receives 17,000 reels of tape.)
1965-1966
The U.S. government
secretly studies a plan to transfer all government records -- including 742
million tax returns and 175 million sets of fingerprints -- to magnetic computer
tape at a single national data center, though the plan is later scrapped amid
public concern about bringing "Orwell's '1984' at least as close as 1970," as
one report puts it. The outcry inspires the 1974 Privacy Act, which places
limits on federal agencies' sharing of personal information.
1989
British
computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposes leveraging the Internet, pioneered
by the U.S. government in the 1960s, to share information globally through a "hypertext"
system called the World Wide Web. "The information contained would grow past a
critical threshold," he writes, "so that the usefulness [of] the scheme would
in turn encourage its increased use."
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