History of Computers - Dropbox
Introduction
Dropbox is a file hosting service headquartered in San Francicso, offering cloud storage, file sync, personal cloud, and client software. It was created by Drew Houston in 2008. Dropbox was unique at the time because it would create a special folder on the user's computer, which would then be sync'd to Dropbox's servers and other devices that the user had Dropbox installed on. Dropbox can be used on Windows, OSX, Linux, and even has mobile options for IOS, Android, and even Google Phones. [1]
Overview
Dropbox has two types of users, a user who pays and a user who doesn't pay. To the user who pays, they are allotted 2 gigs of storage in the cloud, while paying will allot you 1 terrabyte. Dropbox rapidly became an innovation in the storage world of computers [2]. But it doesn't stop there, Dropbox has been constantly updating since it's release in 2008, having come out with new features such as 'Streaming Sync' in 2014, which doubled the upload and download speed of files, and 'Universal 2nd Factor', which enabled users to have to option of 2-factor-authentication to ensure more security on their files. [3]
Significance
The significance of Dropbox was that it was one of the first programs to enable develop cloud storage for users on a very large scale. Today, Dropbox has over 50 million users, and is not worth almost $10 billion[4]. Dropbox also pushed lots of other companies and software designers to come up with a more efficient means of cloud storage, and today Dropbox is facing big competitors such as Google.
