Teradata turned 40 years old this year, putting it in the ranks of a small group of IT household names such as IBM, SAS, and Oracle that were either born or (in IBM’s case) endured the evils of polyester and disco. When the company was formed, the notion of a terabyte of data was practically unimaginable. Fortunately, when someone put up a slide showing how the frontiers of storage have passed from terabyte to gigabyte, petabyte, and zetabyte, we breathed a sigh of relief that Teradata didn’t feel the need to change its name to keep current.
