Gil Press schreef in mei 2013 in Forbes een artikel over de geschiedenis van Big Data, die al vroeg begon. Hij startte zijn artikel met:

“The story of how data became big starts many years before the current buzz around big data. Already seventy years ago we encounter the first attempts to quantify the growth rate in the volume of data or what has popularly been known as the “information explosion” (a term first used in 1941, according to theOxford English Dictionary). The following are the major milestones in the history of sizing data volumes plus other “firsts” in the evolution of the idea of “big data” and observations pertaining to data or information explosion.”