Maybe it's a good time to mention that the grant I got for my PhD research is a project collecting documents and oral histories of GIS software development. Materials collected will eventually be accessioned to the Computer History Museum. If you work/have worked on GIS tools (web mapping is part of it!!) I would love to talk to you!!
@ingrid Oh there we go! https://web.archive.org/web/20050206033808/http://www.southwestdata.org/tools/contact/contact.shtml
Bill died, Randy I think is still around my hometown, Karen moved to Oregon and started Off Piste Magazine and might be able to be found. There's a couple other people who were involved but never a part of the organization on the ISP side — my boss and the former owner the ISP; me; and the original owner of OurayNet who is now off in Hawaii.
@ingrid And https://web.archive.org/web/19961220091746/http://landuse.com/ is even older part of that work.
@ingrid Worldwide? I started in 1990 in the UK in one of the national GIS labs set up for social science/health research. First job was implementing spatial stats in ARC/INFO...
@geospacedman I'm looking a bit more at the industry side than government but user stories and gov adoption is certainly relevant
@ingrid @geospacedman
Do you plan to cover also community / open data aspects?
@richlv @geospacedman yes! would very much like to avoid academic geography's weird tendency to treat OSM and open source mapping stuff as some weird alternate dimension of GIS
@ingrid @geospacedman And the corporate history cannot be always trusted - somebody 50 years later could stumble upon this quote from an Apple manager and have an utterly incorrect impression… https://en.osm.town/@SK53/110864447079543025
@ingrid oh mannnn we used to spend time in proximity with Scott Morehouse those were wild stories. I bet Amber Case would have some gems.
@ingrid I mean or if you could track down Morehouse for a couple hours but I’m not sure what he’s up too these days
@ingrid @tsherrygeo No GIS software development, but my first office job was digitising paper maps showing the sewer systems of the North West of England… Many moons ago!
Maybe interesting to you and you might be able to help :)
@apgarcia @ingrid .. at least https://intevation.de/~bernhard/archiv/uwm/ still has my term paper for the GIS course on how to get GRASS running on 64 bit in 1999. And https://web.archive.org/web/20180506202014/http://freegis.org/ the last snapshot of FreeGIS.org :) #FreeSoftware
@divya @ingrid Hi Ingrid! I’m the originator of MMGIS (https://github.com/NASA-AMMOS/MMGIS). Happy to chat sometime. I’ve also worked in GIS for 30 years, so have seen and experience the GIS evolution.
@ingrid @sigte_udg organized the conference where the QGIS 3.0 was developed. The version is called Girona because it was held in that Catalan city. https://www.udg.edu/en/sigte
@ingrid we might have some interesting software from our early days of working with satellite data. Great project regardless ☺️
@developmentseed would love to chat for sure!
@ingrid interesting I miss the early #Arcexplorer version used on our 2002 GROMS CD #GIS
@ingrid In 1997 and 1998 I worked at the Houston Chronicle. One of my jobs was deploying and maintaining a directory of businesses with location mapping. We used census data maps, and some pretty rudimentary location data.
@susannahkirby @ingrid ah I don't think anything I've worked on is as cool or interested as some of the many cool & interesting folks I've worked *with*! Boosting for reach, I know they're out here 👀
Late 80s / early 90s may be late for a GIS in general, but this one was the first I really saw pushed out to general use computers (because it was supposed to be used by firefighters):
@ingrid
I'm not sure if they're elligible but I made bunch of small OSM-related softwares:
https://github.com/dearrude/osm-detective
@ingrid I'm no GIS celebrity but first job out of college was making web maps for the NWS, tilted at windmills with OS X geotagging shareware for a while, got to hang out with GeoLoqi folks and do some "Cloud Cartography" WebGL experiments at the next job, tilted at windmills processing satellite images after that, contributed a bit to Polymaps and D3 and now Leaflet most recently.
@ingrid I studied surveying and GIS in the 90ies. Perhaps I have some stories to tell?
@ingrid Are you aware of https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ ( Documents and citations) and https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Citation_Repository#Historic_citations ( the scanned documents go back to 1989)? Maybe ping @neteler, he might know more, especially GRASS- and OSGeo-related.
@OtoKalab @ingrid https://twitter.com/drpeterloewe is making such collection for the german library (well, basically mostly written and digitized material)
I could give you many names, but best is, you just start with Sol Katz Award list https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sol_Katz_Award and move further to OSGeo board members https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors#History_of_OSGeo_Foundation_Boards_of_Directors
@ingrid not sure if this is in the scope, but a uni friend and I once built a pedestrian navigation system for Daimler. It was serving mobile phone users in Berlin using WAP and was deployed at IBM in ca. 2000. The navigation data came from some XML-based API provided by Daimler and was targeting cars IIRC, so had to be “translated” for pedestrians. I remember some headaches recognising roundabouts because Daimler’s API would serve those as multiple right turns in a row…
@ingrid I did and still do work with GIS and RS
@ingrid I released a customizable, shareware web map thing in Flash back in 2004. https://backspace.com/mapapp/
@ingrid I think I may have some materials from the early days (1990s) of this place: https://www.scanus.com/microgrid-cartography-demographics-methodology.htm
Including maybe software manuals🍸😺
@ingrid Hi Ingrid. Some people I worked with at Geosciences in Edinburgh did a lot of pioneering work with GIS. If you like I can give you some contact details. Where are you working on this?
@ingrid GISsurfer is a general purpose web map with broad support for displaying GIS data. I am the developer.
https://gissurfer.com
@ingrid I only know this from the outside, but maybe you can get some info about Kurt Menke's Community Health Maps, which used to be supported by the National Library of Medicine.
@ingrid
I worked for a wireless ISP in 2001-2003 and somehow got mixed up in Mapinfo/decibel planner/MapXtreme. Not a lot to tell but MapInfo ended up following me around for quite a number of years afterward.
@ingrid Oh geez, I think some of the people I worked with died, but we were doing web accessible maps of county land use in 1997(I think), the ISP I worked with in concert with a weird little non profit ("Southwest Data Center") and Ouray County, Colorado. I might be able to scare up some contacts if I shake my memory hard enough.