The topic is interesting but unfortunately the article lacks on "data visualisation" examples. Although interesting to know how it was before computers, more like art than data science, it would be good to see how it evolved on computers from 1987 to now.
Many common data visualizations pre-date 1987 -- but it certainly would be interesting to read about how technology has changed our approach to them.
This article could be considerably longer, I agree. As such, it is merely an interesting introduction.
It is fascinating to see that people repeat the same simple errors that were considered errors almost 80 years ago.
Foundational principles from scholars such as Tufte and Bertins have helped influence data visualization over the years from a presentation perspective, but software improvements, such as D3.js, have tremendously assisted in the implementation piece of data visualization. Further, computer improvements and the advent of languages like R and Python have also allowed us to clean, process, and present a much greater volume of data than could have been achieved in the 80s and 90s.