The world of data is changing. Size is increasing. We’ve moved from bits to bytes, to kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes, just in our hands. We can’t even really conceive of what this amount of storage means in a physical sense. Our large systems have grown to petabytes, perhaps exabytes and zettabytes one day and eventually to yottabytes and beyond.
We transfer data quicker. No longer a 300 baud modem. watching the text crawl across the screen.
Our mobile data moved from SMS to GPRS to Edge to 4G and LTE, which are amazing speeds, faster than many of the early networks and now 5G and 6G and maybe we’ll keep going to subspace radio? Who knows.
Some of you may still remember tape storage. What a move forward to floppy disks. get a floppy disk drive, to hard disks to solid state disks to 3D drives It looks like 3D SSD technology is going to fundamentally change the world, with latencies that will require our software to be very, very efficient.
Interfaces have also improved, to allow us to move more data, quicker. From SMD to ESDI to ATA to IDE to SATA to SCSI to Wide SCSI to Fast SCISI to Fast Wide SCSI to Ultra SCSI to Ultra Wide SCSI. SCSI 2 to SCSI 3 to Fibrechannel, infiniband and beyond. USB to Firewire 400 to USB 2 to Firewire 800 to USB 3, 3.1, eSata, Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 3, and who knows what’s next?
Our computers used to be room,size with another room full of punch clerks. Then we moved to minis, with the computer in the room. Then we got desktops and portable luggable machines, moving to laptops that we can carry one handed to handhelds computers in our pockets. We even went to tiny devices that we found were too small. So we’ve gone the other way with smartphones and phablets and iPads and tablets and smart watches Now the world around us is being enhanced with virtual reality and Hololens.
We used to have amps and road sings now we have GPS. We used to key data data now we use rfid. and QRS codes
Our world is using all this technology to monitor, mark, chip, tag, record, watch, measure, and gather data. We get to work with that data. We get to gather, store, manage, index, backup, transfer, clean, and care for all that data. We need to work with it. We’ve got to move it with text files, CSVs, Excel, Word, PDF, MP3, MP4 and more.
We send data over TCP, FTP, SMB, AirDrop, VPN, Web services, REST, jQuery, and more.
We share data with files, messages, texts, clicks, likes, tweets, pings, drops, shares, snaps, hangouts, and once in a while, we communicate with phones.
We have many things to learn in order to reach our potential in working with data. We have the chance and potential to build amazing visualizations. We can analyze our business progress, producing tables, charts, graphs, animations, and of course, reports. We can map our own activities and events, tracking how we interact with the world, experience it, perhaps even using the data to relive, remember, or reinvent the world around us.
IoT is starting connect almost every kind of device.
What do we do with all that data? Almost anything.!
We have PowerPivot, Power query, Power View, Power map, and Power BI. It seems Microsoft really believes data has power. Predictive analytics and Big data are turning data into action.

• Previous Entry: Dynamics 365 public launch event.
• Next Entry: Azure comes of age and its a lot cheaper.