https://placing.technology/media-archaeology-with-mapinfos-mapxpress-2-0-1996 blogged about old mapping software (well, advertising for it) to feel something as I work on my dissertation
@scruss I take it the learning curve was not great lol
@ingrid I'd never used GIS at all, but I knew I needed to make a constraints map out of all the various data sources I had.
I seem to remember having to build tables of everything, then somehow uniting them in a map. I ended up doing most of it at home in QGIS, despite my IT department's dire warning that using open source software made your data go public domain (what?)
@scruss yes, this is how open source works obviously
@ingrid the IT in this company as a joke, so this kind of attitude didn't surprise me.
Everything was consolidated in one data centre, which went down for two days because someone tripped the halon. Because the IT director was such a bullshitter in a hick town, his department *got huge bonuses* for bringing the systems back so quickly.
@ingrid ooh, now there's a logo I'd hoped never to see again. Worked at a place (c.2008) that had been the city water and power utility for Edmonton, AB. I needed a GIS system for the wind power design work I was doing. They had an elderly MapInfo site licence. I had to teach myself GIS from MapInfo, without anyone else in my satellite office using it.
That was ... fun