managed to write this whole chapter on desktop GIS without mentioning that the reason Esri only runs on Windows machines is they went all in on COM architecture and I guess they thought Apple was too niche, is this a thing anyone else will care about
@geospacedman wow! what year was that?
@ingrid my first postdoc, 1990.
@ingrid the UK research councils set up a network of Regional Research Labs to do GIS social science research and fitted them out with Sun 3/60 micros, Calcomp printers and digitisers, and the odd DOS box. And some researchers...
@ingrid being wrong™ always makes for good copy. as a snarky footnote at least 'how's that com thing working for you'
@ingrid drag and dropping data into QGIS on MacOS was a game changer to me so yes, totally IMHO
@clhenrick cross platform software, unimaginable for the GIS professional LOL
@clhenrick my apologies I forgot they are your employer
@ingrid 🚬 com architecture? Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long while
@ingrid I think it's important because it really reinforces the ESRI-open source divide. (and selfishly, it's why I've never had a chance to learn the ESRI toolchain)
@eldang i took a class for my graduate coursework just to see what the fuss was about and: i guess if you like clicking through software wizards it's great, but i kept mentally working through what chain of geopandas commands would get me the same result
@ingrid Everything I do know about the ESRI stack makes me happy to be working on the other side of that divide. But it is frustrating how many interesting job postings call for ESRI-specific experience and I can't get that experience without first having a job that would give me access to the software.
@ingrid I remember when it also ran on SunOS, and we only had PC ArcInfo because it could attach to the digitiser.