&quot;According to a USA Today article from June 22, 1998, the initial plan with Terraserver was to list every single transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange online and make it searchable. But that was only a half terabyte of data. Microsoft needed something larger.&quot;<p>I&#x27;d be curious to see what the size of that collection is now, post advent of high frequency trading.<p>Side note, the article in no way explains why Google Earth would be considered a success story. The lead engineer from this project went on to Bing Maps, it&#x27;s not as if MS decided geographic data wasn&#x27;t worth doing.