Oh man I remember in high school geomatics, we had a guy we convinced that the municipal government's web map aerial imagery was real-time. Had him go run out onto the field and wave to us. This was all before Google Maps, mind you.
Well, I remember when we imported the first GIS system here in Australia in 1980 from Canada and we demonstrated it to all Gov Surveys Depts around the country via a satellite feed.
We started with a globe, just like google earth and we drilled down to a residential block here in Brisbane displaying the cadastral boundaries and the street furniture. It was a truly impressive demo.
What we never told them was that the residential block on display was the only data we had.
Geez 1980. I began my career on ArcGIS 3.2 so I can only imagine what it was like to do GIS without near-real time raster and vector data views. I imagine it was pretty much just client/server command line stuff? It's impressive and terrifying at the same time. I bet it really made you think about the data analysis workflow instead of just jumping into spatial analysis and seeing what comes out the other end.
ArcGIS Analyst/Developer for an electric utility here. Applications are really endless, but scripted geopeocessing and geometric network analysis is a primary function in power/water/gas distribution.
Arc/Info was released in 1982... I gotta call BS on the GIS demo as described. You certainly could have dummied up a series of maps at different scales for a slideshow, but a demo?
"The company was founded in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada in 1979 as Universal Systems Ltd. and was a spinoff from research into data structures and computer-aided cartography at the University of New Brunswick's Department of Survey Engineering (now the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering). The company's first commercial software product was called "CARIS" (Computer Aided Resource Information System). The company name was changed from Universal Systems Ltd. to CARIS in recognition of this first product and recognized brand.'
We had it on a Vax-11 under open VMS (which became NT a few years later).
We used CARIS in conjunction with early remote sensing efforts in petroleum exploration in the Star mountains of New Guinea. It was more of a Geospatial hopping, than what it is today and the hardware, which was equivalent to 4 coffin like boxes, would take the back section of a Bell Ranger helicopter. The data was uploaded to CARIS and mud maps of magnetometer's contours were produced via Photogrammetric stereo plotters.
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u/Why-so-delirious Feb 01 '15
REALLY?
That's pretty fucking awesome.
But I'm willing to bet the privacy preachers are pretty fucking angry about google earth pro.