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History of GISThe Commercial Era: 1980 to 2010

Erik HoelCraig GillgrassMatt McGrath

June 2010Version 19

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Background

• Why?– Random conversation in Matt McGrath’s office

a couple years ago after reading Nick Chrisman’sbook (we all knew very little about this topic)

• Focus– Timeline style approach– Nothing truly historical (e.g., before computers)

• Caveats– We are not historians, merely curious ESRI development staff– Intended to be low-key and fun – not scholarly– Determining what is historical is quite hard …

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Overview

• Timeline of GIS development• Key academic developments • Significant contributors and personalities • Commercial technologies• Cold War’s influence• Impact of computer technology• ESRI’s role• Lots of amazing trivia

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Message to Our External Reviewers

Your chance to influence history! Shape how young minds perceive the past! Cement your place (and your friends) in the historical record! Expunge your enemies and the wannabees!

Law of the Famous

“The famous are given most, if not all, of the credit, and a large number of others who also made key contributions to the success are largely ignored.”

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1981

• IBM releases the Personal Computer (model 5150)– Development led by Don Estridge; he realized that cost

effectiveness required 3rd party hardware and software– Starting price of $1565 ($3700 today)– Intel 8088 CPU (4.77MHz, 16 bit)– 16KB RAM– 160KB 5.25” floppy drive– 63.5W power supply– PC named the Time’s 1982 Man of the Year

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1981

• Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795– The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kB of memory, a

modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives– The machine was a big success, and the follow-ups looked

pretty promising, but in 1983 Osborne preannounced the next generation before it was built, cutting the feet out from under the existing machines and triggering the collapse of the company a few months later

– The 'Osborne Effect‘ became a textbook example of how not to do it

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1981

• Alpine and Honda develop the Electro Gyrocator (first commercial car navigation system)– It did not use GPS, but instead had an experimental gas

gyroscope that could detect both rotation and movement– Maps were placed inside the unit and would scroll past an

illumination screen as the car traveled– It was an option on the Accord ($2,746); ¼ value of the car– It is unclear whether any units were actually delivered to

customers

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1981

• ESRI held its first User Conference– Attended by 16 people at the ESRI campus in

Redlands– Representing 11 user sites

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1982

• ESRI releases ARC/INFO 1.0– Followed CGIS idea of separating attribute and

locational information– Combined a standard RDBMS (INFO) to handle

attribute data with specialized software to handle objects stored as arcs (ARC)

– A toolbox with command-driven, product-oriented user interface

– First GIS to take advantage of super-minis (Prime; then IBM, VAX, DG)

– Took 9 months to develop (10/81 – 6/82)

New Brunswick Forestry first customer

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ESRI – Turnkey Systems

• ESRI would come to your site and in one week:– Install the hardware (including its OS)– Install the software– Run the communication lines– Install the plotter– Install the printer– Install the digitizing tablet

• “Intro to ARC/INFO” training– 2 weeks, comprehensive, on site

• Phone support by anyone who answered the phone

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1982

• The SPOT Image Company founded– First commercial company established to

distribute geographic information derived from Earth Observation Satellites worldwide

• University of Maryland obtains first academic ARC/INFO license

• Nova Scotia Land Survey Institute (COGS) was one of first schools to get an ARC/INFO license

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ESRI – First 10 Customers*

1. State of Alaska – Fish and Game2. State of Alaska – Dept. of Natural Resources3. Municipality of Anchorage, AK4. State of Arizona – Water Resources5. State of Arizona – Land Dept.6. City of Albuquerque – Information Systems7. University of South Carolina – Geography (site)8. State University of New York – Geography (site)9. AT&T – IT GIS (nee Bellsouth) 10. Boise Cascade

*According to customer number in SAP; ESRI did business with many customers for a long time before numbering system put in place.13 .

1982

• First Soviet GLONASS experimental Block-1 navigation satellite launched– Global coverage completed in 1995– A second generation satellite navigation system, improving

on the Tsiklon system– Provided positioning accuracy of 55–70 m horiz, ~70 m vert

• 15-year old Steve Juraszek (Hero) of Arlington Heights, IL, plays Defender for 16 hours, 34 min, on the same quarter– His score: 15,963,100

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1982

• Development of GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) began at the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Labs– Originally called FHGIS (Fort Hood Geographic Information

System)– Raster-based GIS program– Developed on a VAX 11/780

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1982• Sun Microsystems founded

– Stanford graduate students Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy (Berkeley)

• Silicon Graphics founded– James Clark (EE professor at Stanford), along with a

group of seven grad students and research staff from Stanford

• Adobe founded– John Warnock and Charles Geschke from Xerox PARC

• Autodesk founded by John Walker– Released AutoCAD, one of the first CAD packages to

run on a PC

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1982

• BELLMAC-32A released (Bell Labs) – first single-chip fully 32-bit microprocessor (32-bit data paths, buses, and addresses)

• Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon invents the smiley, the first emoticon

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Emoticons

• Three years earlier (April 12, 1979), Kevin McKenzie (USC) of Arpanet's MsgGroup:– Original message lost until September 2002 – Retrieved from old VAX backup tape from 1982– Ambrose Bierce (1912), the snigger point - for

ironical sentences

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1982• First large scale computer virus (Elk Cloner) hatched

by Rich Skrenta– Student at Mt. Lebanon Sr. High School near Pittsburgh– Developed on an Apple II– A boot sector virus on floppies– Every 50th boot, a poem would appear, saying in part, "It will

get on all your disks; it will infiltrate your chips." – The first computer virus (Creeper) was detected on

ARPANET in the early 1970s - Creeper gained access via a modem and copied itself to the remote system and displayed 'I'M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.'

“It was some dumb little practical joke”

- R. Skrenta

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1983

• ETAK digital mapping company was formed by Stanley Honey and seven others from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)

• Caliper Corp founded (developer of TransCAD)• ESRI released ARC/INFO 2.0

– NETWORK– ARC COGO

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1983

• Ronald Reagan announces GPS signals would be available for civilian use after the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines 747 (KAL 007)– Strayed into Soviet airspace due to navigational

errors; 269 people killed

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1983• Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program released by Mitch Kapor

and Lotus– First “killer app” for the IBM PC– Contributed significantly to the success of the PC in the

corporate environment • The Domain Name System (DNS) is invented by Jon Postel

and Paul Mockapetris– A hierarchical naming system for computers connected to the

Internet– It associates information with domain names assigned to each of

the participants; it translates domain names into the numerical ids associated with networking equipment

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1983

• Edward Tufte published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information– Presented the Theory of Data Graphics with its four main

aspects: 1. elimination of "chartjunk"; 2. maximization of "data-ink"; 3. multifunctioning graphical elements; and 4. high data density

– Tufte considered Charles Minard’s 1861 map of Napoleon's Russian campaign the best statistical graphic ever drawn

– Changed the way that people thought about the presentation of informational graphics

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1984• The first International Spatial Data Handling

Symposia (SDH) was held, organized by Kurt Brassel (University of Zurich)– Roger Tomlinson gave the keynote address

• Bentley Systems founded by Keith and Barry Bentley• Marble, Calkins, and Peuquet's "Basic Readings in

Geographic Information Systems" was published– Considered the first accessible source of info about GIS

• Apple releases the Macintosh

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1984

• Toni Guttman (Berkeley) publishes the original R-tree spatial data structure paper– Multidimensional extension to B-trees– 4103 citations

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1984

• Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) states at the first Hackers‘ Conference:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

• A corollary from the 2008 RSA Conference:Information wants to be free, and code wants to be wrong.

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1985

• Bjarne Stroustrup (Bell Labs) published The C++ Programming Language after inventing the language– Work begun in 1979 when attempting to add Simula-like

features to C (termed C with Classes)– Later becomes the dominant Object-Oriented language

• Symbolics registered the first .COM domain name• Microsoft released Windows 1.0

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1985

• ETAK produced the first automated car navigation system

• ESRI released ARC/INFO 3.0– CLEAN and BUILD

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1985

• Ozone hole was confirmed by measurements from the Nimbus-7 Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer– TOMS launched in 1978– Ozone hole first noted by British scientists– Led to the first Montreal Protocol, where forty

nations agreed to a 50% reduction in the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by 1999

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Arc Mystery

• A port of Mystery Mansion text-based adventure game to ARC/INFO 3– The object was to find one's way through a run-down,

mansion in order to find various treasures, solve a murder, sleep with the maid (if very lucky), and avoid getting killed before the mansion is destroyed by fire at midnight to end the game

– Also known as the “maze game” due to difficult maze that was part of the game

• Removed from ARC/INFO once Support got calls asking how to get out of the maze

“Back when GIS was fun!”- Bill Moreland

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31 .

1986• BBC Domesday Project, the first multimedia GIS

application, completed by David Rhind, Openshaw, and others– The original Domesday Book was the record of the great

survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William the Conqueror

– New multimedia edition compiled between 1984 and 1986– It included a new 'survey' of the United Kingdom - people

(mostly school kids) wrote about their daily lives• Over 1 million people participated in the project• One of first attempts to publish governement statistics and data

collected by kids in an accessible way– Linked with maps, many color photos, statistical data, video,

and 'virtual walks‘

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David received the 2004 ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award

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1986• MapInfo was founded by four students from the

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute• Peter Burrough's "Principles of Geographic

Information Systems for Land Resources Assessment" published– First textbook on GIS

• The first SPOT satellite was launched• COGS (Nova Scotia College of Geographic Sciences)

formed from the Nova Scotia Land Survey Institute

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ESRI - 1986

• ESRI released PC ARC/INFO• Ran on IBM PC/AT under DOS 3.1• PC version of INFO

– Used INFO until 1990, then dBASE• Technical Support becomes a formal department

with two fulltime staff• Training - new training center

– Single two week course

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1987

• GEOVIEW developed by Tom Waugh and Healey at the University of Edinburgh– Represented all data within an RDBMS (both

spatial and non-spatial), using a very simple schema – an ENTITY table and an ATTRIBUTES table

– Highly normalized representation• The first GIS/LIS Conference was held as part

of the ACSM/ASPRS Conference in Baltimore

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1987

• The International Journal of Geographical Information Systems (IJGIS) was first published

• The IDRISI Project was started by Ron Eastman at Clark University– Popular as an academic tool for teaching the

principle theories behind GIS • SPANS GIS was released by Tydac

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1987

• Joint Resolution of Congress establishes Geography Awareness Week– The third week of each November, promoting the

importance of geography education in the United States

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1987

• Association of American Geographers creates the GIS Specialty Group– Largest specialty group in AAG

• First ESRI User Conference in Palm Springs• ESRI releases ARC/INFO 4

– AML– UNIX Workstations– UNIX installs done by user– 1,500 ARC/INFO systems in use

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The Geocoding Experiment

• Peter Gould (Penn State) sent envelopes to 34 colleagues worldwide with Waldo Tobler’s (UCSB) geographical coordinates– Test universality of geocoding standards– 34º26’41”N, 119º48’26”W– Four letters arrived– Unexpected routing

Peter awarded the 1993 Prix Vautrin Lud

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1988

• Smallworld was founded by ten researchers with experience in computer graphics and databases from the CADCentre in Cambridge, and Cambridge Interactive Systems – the producer of Medusa (CAD)

• Joe Becker (Xerox) published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode" – Unicode 2.0 in 1996 removed the 16-bit limitation– Klingon remains unsupported due to lack of real-world use

• New ESRI regional offices: Olympia, Charlotte

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1988

• The GIS-L internet list-server was started by Ezra Zubrow, SUNY Buffalo

• The first public release of the U.S. Bureau of Census TIGER (Topographically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) digital data product

• First IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellite is launched - IRS-1A

• New ESRI regional office: Minneapolis

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1988

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• Alan Saalfeld (Census Bureau) proposes automated vector conflation in his paper Conflation: Automated Map Compilation– Using geometrical similarities between spatial attributes

(e. g., location, shape, etc.) to eliminate the spatial inconsistency between two overlapping vector maps

– Saalfeld discussed mathematical theories to support the automatic process

– Delaunay triangulation is an effective strategy to partition the domain space into triangles (influence regions) to define local adjustments

1988

• The Morris worm was created by Robert Morris (Cornell PhD student)– One of the first computer worms distributed via the

Internet to get mainstream media attention– Intended to estimate size of Internet, but programming

bug resulted in a virulent denial of service attack– Resulted in the first conviction under the 1986 Computer

Fraud and Abuse Act– The worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that

the worm originally came from Cornell– Morris is now an associate professor at MIT

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1989

• Stan Aronoff's Geographic Information Systems: A Management Perspective published

• First Symposium on the Design and Implementation of Large Spatial Databases (SSD) held in Santa Barbara

• Association for Geographic Information (AGI) established in the UK based upon the Chorley Committee report of 1987

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1989

• The WWW (World Wide Web) was created by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, for CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Geneva

• Concepts introduced: – HTML– HTTP– URL

Tim received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth

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Robert received the Order of Leopold from King Albert II

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1989• The NCGIA (National Center for Geographic

Information and Analysis) was established through NSF grant– University of California at Santa Barbara– SUNY Buffalo– University of Maine at Orono

• Intergraph launches MGE • ESRI released ARC/INFO 5.0• New ESRI regional offices: Boston, Washington DC,

Denver, Austin• 300 ESRI employees

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1989• Guido van Rossum (BDFL – Benevolent

Dictator for Life) begins development of the Python programming language– A "hobby" programming project that kept him occupied

during the week around Christmas 1989– Intended as a descendant of ABC that would appeal to

Unix/C hackers– Python is often used as a scripting language for web apps– Python was intended to be a highly readable, with an

uncluttered visual layout

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1990• MAP (Map Analysis Package) developed by Dana

Tomlin (Harvard)– A raster-based GIS based upon David Sinton’s IMGRID as

well as Ian McHarg’s map overlay concepts– Keyword approach of IMGRID was changed to an English-

using command language – Many features for easy raster manipulation– Based upon PhD research at Yale– Eventually installed at several thousand locations

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1990

• The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) established by OMB– Interagency committee that promotes the coordinated

development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis

– Charged with coordinating the development of the NSDI • The American Cartographer renamed Cartography

and Geographic Information Systems – Reflected desire to be more inclusive of GIS– Later in 1996 renamed Cartography and Geographic

Information Science

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1990

• Mitsubishi and Pioneer release the first GPS-based auto navigation systems in Japan

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1991 • The first ERS (European Remote Sensing) satellite

launched – ERS-1• Harvard Lab closed• Visual Basic 1.0 introduced with a drag and drop

design for creating application user interfaces– Derived from a prototype form generator developed

by Alan Cooper – Project Ruby• Linux kernel first released by Linus Torvalds (Finland)

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1991

• Seen as the turning point in the GIS industry due to the beginning of mass acceptance of GIS

• ESRI released ArcView 1 and ARC/INFO 6.0– Major reengineering– Redesigned menu-interface– Dynamic segmentation– Enhanced cartographic tools– GRID extension for raster modeling

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1992

• DCW (Digital Chart of the World) released by US Defense Mapping Agency (now NGA)– First integrated 1:1million scale database with global

coverage– $10M contract to ESRI (awarded 1989) – resulted in large

increase in ESRI employees• First KH-12 reconnaissance satellite

– Presumed similar to an enlarged Hubble Space Telescope– Estimated 10cm resolution

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1992

• IBM demonstrates Simon at COMDEX– World’s first smartphone ($899; $1300 today)– Contained a calendar, address book, world clock,

calculator, note pad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games

– No physical buttons to dial with, customers used a touch-screen to select phone numbers

– Text entered with an on-screen "predictive" keyboard

– Low-end by today's standards

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1992• OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) developed by Silicon

Graphics– Standard cross-language, cross-platform API for 2D and 3D graphic

applications– Direct3D is competitor on Windows platforms

• CPGIS (Intl. Assoc. of Chinese Professionals in GIS) formed to foster cooperation between Chinese GIS professionals worldwide

• Samba developed by Andrew Tridgell (PhD student at the Australian National University)– Allows a host to interact with a Windows client as if it is a Windows

file and print server

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1993

• The first web-based interactive map (Xerox PARC Map Viewer) was developed by Steve Putz– Implemented as a Perl script– Accepted requests for map renderings and returns an

HTML document including an inlined GIF image• Mosaic, the first popular web browser, released by

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications)– Written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina

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1993• The GPS system achieved initial operational

capability– A complete constellation of 24 satellites– A mere 30+ years after TRANSIT

• First ACM-GIS workshop in Arlington, Virginia• First COSIT (Conference on Spatial Information

Theory) in Elba, Italy• EUROGI founded

– Mission was to maximize the availability and effective use of geographic information throughout Europe

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1993

• Windows NT was released, first version to use 32-bit flat virtual memory on 32-bit processors– Opened the door to migration from Unix workstations to

the PC platform for high end applications such as GIS• Intel released the Pentium – their first superscalar

x86 processor– The Pentium FDIV bug was later discovered by Thomas

Nicely (Lynchburg College) in October 1994– FDIV is the x86 assembly language instruction for floating-

point division

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ESRI Professional Services 1970’s • Site and Parcel Mapping

• Environmental Analysis• Facility Siting

1980’s • City, State and Regional Mapping• Land Capability/Suitability Analysis• New Town Siting and Planning

1990’s • National Mapping/Database Development• Natural Resource Analysis and Management• Utility/Facility Mapping and Analysis• Rent-A-Tech Program

21st Century • Global Database Development• Nautical/Aeronautical Data Management• Enterprise Design and Implementation• EEAP/BPAP Programs• Application Solution Development

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1994

• NSDI (National Spatial Data Infrastructure) created in the U.S. by executive order of Bill Clinton– Spatial data is considered a national capital asset– The NSDI manages the distribution of these assets across

all interconnected systems, federal and private sector, and analyzes it to determine the impact of the world economically, physically, and socially upon the US

• Use of SDTS (Spatial Data Transfer Standard) becomes mandatory for US Federal Agencies– Developed by USGS between 1980-1992

• OpenGIS Consortium formed

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1994

• ISO/TC 211 technical committee formed within ISO, tasked with covering the areas of digital geographic information and geomatics– Simple feature access – Reference models – Spatial and temporal schemas – Location-based services – Metadata – Web feature and map services – Classification systems

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1994

• MapServer web GIS (Minnesota) begins development– Intended to support web-based delivery of forestry data– Java applets, initially UNIX/Linux based

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee– Founded at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

(MIT/LCS) with support from the European Commission and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

– Standards include: CGI, CSS, HTML, SOAP, SVG, WSDL, XML, XPath, and XQuery

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1994

• First Blog created by Claudio Pinhanez at the MIT Media Lab website – Basically the first web page in an online-diary format – Other early bloggers included Justin Hall, Carolyn

Burke, and Bryon Sutherland– Technorati (search engine for searching blogs) is

currently tracking 112.8 million blogs

• ESRI released ARC/INFO 7.0 and ArcView 2.0

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ArcView GIS• 1.0 (late 1991)

– Easy to use desktop display and query software– Shipped 10,000 copies in first half of 1992

• 2.0 (1994)– Authorized Training Program (ATP)

• 3.0 (1996)– Shapefiles– Avenue– Extensions

• 3.2 (1999)– ModelBuilder

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1995

• RADARSAT developed and launched by Canada– An Earth observation satellite with Synthetic

Aperture Radar (SAR) to monitor environmental change and support resource sustainability

– Orbit path repeats every 24 days• Britain’s Ordnance Survey achieves first

complete digital map coverage of a country (Great Britain) in a database– 230,000 maps (1:1250, 1:2500, 1:10,000)

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1995• NGDF (National Geospatial Data Framework) launched

in the UK– The UK’s spatial data infrastructure– Improve knowledge of existing GI and encourage easier

access to it– Standards (e.g., metadata) and Services– Public and private sector

• Java programming language released by Sun Microsystems– Originally developed by James Gosling– Applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run

on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

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1995

• FGDC Metadata Standard required for all federal agencies in the US– All new geospatial data created by federal

agencies must be documented in FGDC and provided through a National Geospatial Clearinghouse

• Oracle releases SDO (Spatial Data Option) on top of Oracle 7

• ESRI employment reaches 1000 people

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1996• First generation Internet-based GIS products released by

major vendors (Autodesk, ESRI, Intergraph, and MapInfo)• MapQuest internet mapping service

launched by Donnelly Geosystems – Within the first week of its launch, both of the company’s servers

went down; within three months, 50 servers needed to handle demand

• ESRI expands the Redlands campus across New York St. with the addition of a three-story R&D Center (Building M)

• MapObjects 1.0 released

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1996

• The first version of the Apache HTTP Server is released by Rob McCool– Played a key role in the initial growth of the

World Wide Web– By 2009 it became the first web server to surpass

the 100 million web site milestone– Apache was the first viable alternative to the

Netscape web server

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1996

• First working draft of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) spec published by W3C– Compiled by a working group of eleven with technical lead

James Clarke– XML is a profile of the SGML ISO standard; most of XML

comes from SGML unchanged• US Federal Communication Commission mandates

that all cellular carriers identify the location of an E-911 caller to within 50-300m– Key driver in development of location based services

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1996

• Palm released the Pilot 1000, the first successful personal digital assistant (PDA), invented by Jeff Hawkins (Palm founder)– Benefited from the ill-fated earlier attempts to create a

popular handheld computing platform by Go and Apple– Originally an attempt at better handwriting recognition

software, but existing hardware found lacking– Modem manufacturer U.S. Robotics provided financial

backing and manufacturing expertise

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ESRI - 1997

• First User Conference to be held in San Diego• ArcView 3.0 released • Work begun on ArcGIS• The numbers

– 58,000 calls handled by Support– 100,000 ARC/INFO seats– 200,000 ArcView seats– 20,000 SDE seats

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1998

• TerraServer project started as a joint research project between Aerial Images, Microsoft, the USGS, and Compaq– Aerial Images wanted to sell imagery online– Microsoft Research needed a large database to

demonstrate the capabilities of its new database software

• Google founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Stanford PhD students)

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1998

• The Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE) was established– Promote academic teaching and research on GIS at the

European level – Facilitate networking activities between geographic

information laboratories at the European level • AM / FM International changes name to GITA

(Geospatial Information and Technology Association)

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1999

• First GIS Day– November 19th

– Grassroots GIS education event– 1.2 million participants worldwide

• IKONOS launched– First commercial high resolution imaging satellite– 90cm resolution panchromatic and multi-spectral

images• Bill Gates net worth briefly surpasses $101B

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1999

• National Geographic’s Map Machine debuts• Napster created by Shawn Fanning to enable online

peer-to-peer MP3 music sharing• Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman publish The Grid -

Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure– A metaphor for making computer power as easy to access

as an electric power – CPU scavenging and volunteer computing were

popularized by SETI@home (2.4 million cpus in 234 countries; 684 TeraFLOPS)

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1999

• Geography Markup Language (GML) ideas first presented to OGC by Ron Lake– An encoding of spatial features in XML– Serves as a modeling language for geographic

systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet

– Contains many primitives, including: feature, geometry, topology, time, coordinate ref. system

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ESRI - 1999

• ArcInfo 8– Reengineering of its GIS software as a large collection of C+

+/COM objects – ArcCatalog, ArcMap, and ArcToolbox desktop apps– Geodatabase data management

• ArcSDE– Storage of spatial and tabular data in commercial DBMS

products• MapObjects 2.0• ArcIMS 3.0

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2000

• Microsoft releases MapPoint– Originally developed from Expedia Streets which was

included with Office 97– Intended for business users but competed in the low-

end GIS market• First GPS-located Geocache is placed by Dave

Ulmer of Beavercreek, OR– Original stash contained software, videos, books, food,

money, and a slingshot– Currently over 800,000 registered geocaches

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2000

• The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) obtained digital elevation models on a near-global scale from 56°S to 60°N– The most complete high-resolution digital

topographic database of Earth to date– A specially modified radar system flew onboard the

Space Shuttle Endeavour during the STS-99– The technique employed is known as

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar– 30m cell resolution

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2000

• United States makes a more accurate GPS signal available for civilian use– Improved the precision of civilian GPS from ~100m to

~20m• C#, a Java-like programming language, announced by

Microsoft– Led by Anders Hejlsberg– Originally called COOL (C-like Obj. Oriented Lang.)

• Dot.Com bubble bursts– NASDAQ hit high of 5132.52 in March 10th

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2001

• More than 1 million users of GIS– 5 million estimated casual users– GIS marketplace > $7 billion– >10% growth per year

• PostGIS released by Refractions Research under the GNU GPL

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2001

• Keyhole launched as spin-off of Intrinsic Graphics (in reference to KH recon satellites)

• David Bowman shuts down the HAL 9000 while in orbit around Jupiter

• Wikipedia founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales – Wales defined the goal of making a publicly editable

encyclopedia– Sanger had idea of using a wiki– Currently over 3M English articles, only 166 in Klingon

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ESRI - 2001• ArcGIS 8.1 released• The numbers:

– Over 10,000 users at Users Conference– Over 100,000 users– Over 1,000,000 licensed software seats

• Training– Instructor-Led Training: 15,271 students in 1649 classes– Virtual Campus: 122,000 members from 178 countries

• 29 ESRI Press Books• Support

– 65 analysts handled 46,052 calls

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2002

• OGC releases the initial Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) – An interface allowing requests for geographical

features across the web using platform-independent calls

• Amazon launches Amazon Web Services– Data centers were using little of their capacity in

order to handle demand spikes

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2003

• Development of the Galileo navigational satellite system was agreed upon by the European Union and the European Space Agency– Free service has accuracy of <4 m horiz, <8 m vert– Fee-based service has accuracy of <1 m

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2004

• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) formed– Biggest GIS user in the world– NIMA renamed to NGA to emphasize geo-intelligence

• First GEOINT Symposium held in New Orleans– Sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence

Foundation (USGIF)

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2004

• ESRI released ArcGIS 9.0– ArcGIS Engine, for embedding GIS functionality into

desktop and field applications– ArcGIS Server, a centrally managed framework for serving

enterprise GIS applications

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2004

• First Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco– Tim O’Reilly described it as “Web 2.0 is the business

revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform”

– Doesn’t refer to updated technical specs, but to changes in the ways developers and end-users utilize the Web

– The Web as a platform– Often incorporates folksonomies, REST or JSON-based APIs,

AJAX/Flash/Flex-based apps, RSS feeds, mashups, blog publishing tools, wikis/forums, user-generated content

89 .

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90 .

2004

• Harvard Graphics Lab reunion at the ESRI User Conference

M

2004

• First TouchTable demonstrated at ESRI User Conference running ArcGlobe– Developed by Northrop Grumman, Applied Minds,

and ESRI– Users interact with data on the table through a

touch-sensitive interface – Focused on the ease of using a paper map, with

the benefits of GIS

91 .

2004

• GIS used for first time in analyzing presidential election results on network TV on election night– CBS Evening News and ESRI staff– ArcGIS Desktop used to display current results– ArcGIS Engine generated hundreds of maps each

hour on election night

92 .

93 .

2005

• Mashup term first used in context of combining content from one website with another– Originally, the combination of the music from one song

with the a cappella from another– Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely

different genres – Influenced by Frank Zappa’s Xenochrony technique

(extracted guitar solos) from the 70s• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web

development technique appears– used for creating interactive web applications

E

2005

• First Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco– Forum to discuss location-aware technologies, services, and

mobile computing• Zillow.com online real estate services founded

– 80,000,000+ home values– Later teamed with Microsoft to offer Bird’s Eye View of the

properties• Amazon provides access to their systems through

Amazon Web Services on a utility computing basis– Key event in the development of cloud computing

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95 .

2006

• Google Earth virtual globe program released– Originally developed by Keyhole (called Earth

Viewer); purchased by Google in 2004– Uses digital elevation model (DEM) data collected

by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission• Microsoft released Virtual Earth

– Website and SDK– MSNs answer to Google Maps

• Laser-Scan renamed 1Spatial

E

96 .

2006

• Nick Chrisman publishes Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS

• Harvard opens the Center for Geographic Analysis• ESRI releases ArcGIS 9.2

– Significant Geodatabase and Server enhancements• First ESRI Developer’s Summit in Palm Springs

E

2006

• Wikimapia launched by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev– Collaborative mapping online resource that

combines Google Maps with a wiki system– Allows users to add information, in the form of a

note, to any location on Earth– Currently has over 8 million places marked and

120,000 registered users

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98 .

2007• 3rd International Polar Year (IPY)

– First occurred in 1882, second was in 1932 – Motivated the IGY in 1957; focus of IPY:

• Status: to determine the environmental status of the poles• Change: to understand historical change and improve future

projections• Global linkages: understand the links and interactions between

polar regions and the rest of the globe• New frontiers: push the frontiers of science at the poles• Vantage point: use the vantage point of the poles to enhance

observatories from the interior of the Earth to the sun and stars• Human dimension: investigate the cultural, historical and social

processes and identify their contributions to global cultural diversity

E

2007

• NAVTEQ purchased by Nokia– Digital map data provider valued at $8.1B– Map coverage in 72 countries on 6 continents

• TeleAtlas purchased by TomTom – Digital map data provider valued at $5.8B– Map coverage in over 200 countries

• Apple introduces the iPhone– Internet connected multimedia smartphone with touch screen

and minimal hardware interface– Functions include camera, media player, texting, visual

voicemail, e-mail, web browsing, and Wi-Fi

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ESRI - 2007

• ESRI breaks ground on new headquarters building (Building Q) on New York St

100 .

E

2008• ACM SIGSPATIAL formed

– ACM SIGSPATIAL addresses issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information with a focus on algorithmic, geometric, and visual considerations. The scope includes, but is not limited to, geographic information systems (GIS)

– www.sigspatial.org • GeoEye launches the GeoEye-1 imaging satellite that

provides 41cm imagery– Highest resolution commercial satellite– Revisits any point on Earth every 3 days– $500M funding by NGA

101 .

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2008

• First WhereCampPDX unconference held in Portland– 100% volunteer-run unconference focusing on all

things geographical– The sessions and schedule defined by participants

at the conference rather than ahead of time

102 .

2009

• ESRI completed new headquarters building (Building Q)

• ArcGIS Explorer 900 released• Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems (and

MySQL) for $7.4B

103 .

2010

• First Redlands GIS Week– Annual event to bring together leaders from

academia, government, and different industries to advance the science and application of geospatial technologies

– Topic – Space Time Modeling and Analysis• ESRI releases ArcGIS 10

104 .

2010

• Raytheon awarded contract to modernize the GPS system (GPS III), replacing older satellites– New navigational signals– Stronger signals, more jamming resistance

105 .

ESRI Lifetime Achievement Awards

• 1996 Roger Tomlinson• 1998 Carl Steinitz• 1999 Waldo Tobler• 2000 Phil Lewis• 2001 Michael Goodchild• 2002 Gilbert Grosvenor• 2003 David Maidment

• 2004 David Rhind, Allan Schmidt

• 2005 David Cowen• 2006 Larry Smarr• 2007 Don Cooke• 2009 Henk Scholten

106 .

2008 User Conference Attendees

Over 14,750 people representing 124 countries

107 .

ESRI Staff Profile• ~1900 employees in Redlands,

almost 2700 worldwide• Represent 700 universities (200

outside the USA)• Most college graduates from:

1. Univ. of Redlands2. Cal State, San Bernardino3. UC Riverside4. Cal Poly, Pomona5. UCLA6. San Diego State7. COGS8. SUNY Buffalo9. Peking/Beijing University10. Hollywood Upstairs Medical

College

• 560 employees representing over 70 countries

• US employees represent all 50 states• 765 have worked at ESRI >10 years• 88 have worked at ESRI >20 years• Citizenship Top 10

1. USA2. India3. Canada4. China5. Russia6. UK7. Germany8. Australia9/10. New Zealand and Mexico

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108 .

109 .

• Nick Chrisman (Univ. of Laval)• John Cloud (USGS)• David Cowen (Univ. of S. Carolina)• Teresa Dolan (ESRI)• Geoff Dutton (Spatial Effects)• Sara Fabrikant (Univ. of Zurich)• Paul Hardy (ESRI-UK)• Harlan Heimgartner (ESRI)• Hugh Keegan (ESRI)• Logan Hardinson (ESRI)• Mike Kevany (PlanGraphics)

• Robert Laurini (INSA Lyon)• David Maguire (ESRI)• Scott Morehouse (ESRI)• Bill Moreland (ESRI)• Robert Seifert (ESRI)• Tina Skousen (ESRI)• Bernt Wahl (UC Berkeley)• Peter Woodsford (1Spatial)• Pusheng Zhang (Microsoft)• John (docent, USS Midway)

References – Personal Communications