

To say that information technology has come a long way in the past few four decades would be an understatement. On Visual.ly, a San Francisco-based startup that connects data experts, designers and marketing professionals, we find an infographic entitled “Bytes Sized” to help us gain a better understanding of the journey from the early days of the PC revolution to the Internet of Things and beyond.
In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unleashed the Apple-1, a limited edition device with five kilobytes of RAM that became known as the first pre-assembled personal computer. Eight years after the historic launch, a much more advanced Tandy 200 hit stores with enough disk space to match the largest feasible reel of punched tape. According to Visual.ly’s chart the latter comes in at about twenty kilobytes, the equivalent of a single page Word document. Needless to say, a lot changed over the course of the next two decades.
By 2007, consumers could store fifty copies of the complete works of William Shakespeare on their Kindles. The first edition of Amazon’s revolutionary e-reader featured 250 megabytes of internal memory, just over half the size of the video content users uploaded to YouTube every second in 2012.
Today, multimedia constitutes a sizable portion of the data on the internet. It will account for an even bigger fraction in 2019, the year the digital universe is expected to surpass 30 zettabytes. That’s more than ten times the 2012 total (2.8 zettabytes).
The rapid increase in data volumes is proportional to the growing number of connected devices in the world. This mega-trend is creating trillion-dollar opportunities for companies like General Electric while also increasing pressure on traditional storage vendors. Case and point: GE is building its Industrial Internet platform on top of AWS.
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