Comment by juanjmanfredi

Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].

[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...

[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudant