4 ms·

Microsoft invented it? I recall working on a digital mapping system in the late 80's that was very similar. We had a very large drum scanner that we used to sca

by jbuzbee 11y ago

Microsoft invented it? I recall working on a digital mapping system in the late 80's that was very similar. We had a very large drum scanner that we used to scan paper maps and imagery at various scales. First we'd rectify the result, then we'd do a color reduction to both cut down the file size and to match the capabilities of the machines of the day. Next we'd slice the image up into 128x128 pixel tiles and assemble the result into a database of various scales that allowed a user to zoom, pan from map to map, overlay symbology, etc. At the time we were working with 300 MB drives, so we were very restricted and had to create specific databases that matched a user's need.

vog 11y ago
That's very interesting. How was the digital mapping system named? Which company did you work for? Who were the customers?
- jbuzbee 11y ago
  I named it. I called it the "Digital Application Map Manager" or DAMM. That way my boss had to ask "When will those DAMM maps be ready?". We had a sub-contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but the ultimate customer was the US Army.
  - simonebrunozzi 11y ago
    Genius. :)
  - javajosh 11y ago
    Having worked on one or two SIBR proposals, I appreciate a good (mis)use of the government's perverse acronym fetish. Bravo!
meddlepal 11y ago
I had a professor who worked on an IBM research project back in the late 80's to build something like Google Earth and Maps. He also made some important contributions to GIS development and research. So yea... I don't think Microsoft invented it by a long stretch.
kozukumi 11y ago
A guy I worked with at Xerox about 10 years ago worked on a government project similar to yours back in the mid-80s to mid-90s. He never said it directly but it is clear it was for the CIA. Apparently even back in the 90s they had shockingly high-res images of a huge amount of the planet. One thing he said that always stuck with me was "whatever we have free access to today you can bet the [US] government had something just as good 20-30 years ago". It is very difficult to process such an idea though, at least for me. When I look at what we have today I find it almost impossible to think such a thing was possible 20 years ago or that governments might have things 20 years ahead of us today. It seems like a few years ago things I use today were impossible. Technology moves so fast I can't really comprehend 2 or 3 years ahead anymore!
mwfunk 11y ago
Very true- image mosaicking of aerial and satellite imagery has been around for decades. There were plenty of GIS and IMINT software systems way before TerraServer. What MS did was put all the pieces together with a web front end that nontechnical people could use. Hopefully that's what the article means by "invented", although that's still a misuse of the term IMO. Tangential rant unrelated to the comment I'm responding to: the media misuses the term "invented" all the time as a synonym for "created a product". All it does is spawn a million pointless threads in tech forums about who invented what and who should get credit for what and why everybody should ignore the contributions of people who stood on the shoulders of anyone else, ignoring the fact that everyone does that always for nearly everything. Witness any thread where someone says something vaguely charitable about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and inevitably some first-year CS undergrad comes along and rants about how those guys did nothing because it was really their engineers that did everything, and inevitably some other first-year CS undergrad comes along and rants about how those engineers did nothing because they were just building off of what some lesser-known engineers did before, and eventually that regresses into yet another first-year CS undergrad ranting about how Dennis Ritchie should get all of the credit for everything that was ever done after 1969, while conveniently ignoring the giants whose shoulders DMR sat atop of. And finally, it comes back around to some grungy middle-aged guy such as myself ranting on HN about people ranting about people ranting about things, so full circle I guess. :)

by jbuzbee 11y ago

vog 11y ago

That's very interesting. How was the digital mapping system named? Which company did you work for? Who were the customers?

jbuzbee 11y ago
I named it. I called it the "Digital Application Map Manager" or DAMM. That way my boss had to ask "When will those DAMM maps be ready?". We had a sub-contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but the ultimate customer was the US Army.
- simonebrunozzi 11y ago
  Genius. :)
- javajosh 11y ago
  Having worked on one or two SIBR proposals, I appreciate a good (mis)use of the government's perverse acronym fetish. Bravo!

meddlepal 11y ago

I had a professor who worked on an IBM research project back in the late 80's to build something like Google Earth and Maps. He also made some important contributions to GIS development and research. So yea... I don't think Microsoft invented it by a long stretch.

kozukumi 11y ago

A guy I worked with at Xerox about 10 years ago worked on a government project similar to yours back in the mid-80s to mid-90s. He never said it directly but it is clear it was for the CIA. Apparently even back in the 90s they had shockingly high-res images of a huge amount of the planet. One thing he said that always stuck with me was "whatever we have free access to today you can bet the [US] government had something just as good 20-30 years ago". It is very difficult to process such an idea though, at least for me. When I look at what we have today I find it almost impossible to think such a thing was possible 20 years ago or that governments might have things 20 years ahead of us today. It seems like a few years ago things I use today were impossible. Technology moves so fast I can't really comprehend 2 or 3 years ahead anymore!

mwfunk 11y ago

Very true- image mosaicking of aerial and satellite imagery has been around for decades. There were plenty of GIS and IMINT software systems way before TerraServer. What MS did was put all the pieces together with a web front end that nontechnical people could use. Hopefully that's what the article means by "invented", although that's still a misuse of the term IMO. Tangential rant unrelated to the comment I'm responding to: the media misuses the term "invented" all the time as a synonym for "created a product". All it does is spawn a million pointless threads in tech forums about who invented what and who should get credit for what and why everybody should ignore the contributions of people who stood on the shoulders of anyone else, ignoring the fact that everyone does that always for nearly everything. Witness any thread where someone says something vaguely charitable about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and inevitably some first-year CS undergrad comes along and rants about how those guys did nothing because it was really their engineers that did everything, and inevitably some other first-year CS undergrad comes along and rants about how those engineers did nothing because they were just building off of what some lesser-known engineers did before, and eventually that regresses into yet another first-year CS undergrad ranting about how Dennis Ritchie should get all of the credit for everything that was ever done after 1969, while conveniently ignoring the giants whose shoulders DMR sat atop of. And finally, it comes back around to some grungy middle-aged guy such as myself ranting on HN about people ranting about people ranting about things, so full circle I guess. :)