Talk with any data-scientist and they'll rant about how they hate the phrase "big data". Odds are they'll mention a story like the following:
My employer came to me and said we want to do some 'big data' work, so we're hiring a consultant to build a Hadoop cluster. So I asked, "How much data do you have?" and he replied, "Oh, we never really measured. But it's big. Really big! BIIIIG!!
Of course I did some back of the envelope calculations and replied, "You don't need Hadoop. We can fit that in RAM if you buy a big enough Dell." he didn't believe me. So I went to dell.com and showed him a server that could support twice that amount, for less than the cost of the consultant.
We also don't seem to appreciate just how fast computers have gotten.