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 TerraSer

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. :)