When I was about 17, I worked with a chartered surveyor (aka géomètre) on digitizing the whole path from Lille to Paris (france) and use the "computer" to split the polygons that were digitized by a team of people using "cadastres" (official, high definition paper maps).

The polygons were entered by a team of people, from the map into a small serial-to-file program, and that file was then fed to a Hypercard stack that did the polygon intersection...

...To was to be the path of the Eurostar Lille<->Paris. The land in the middle was expropriated, sometime leaving landowner with bit of land they could not reach as the next "bridge" back to it was 20 miles away!

Anyway, I used hypercard back then for a multitude of reasons at the time. It had "plugins" to read/write stuff, it had pretty good interface, it allowed code to very easily detect errors in the digitizer input, and allowed a very, very rough preview of what the "cut" would look like.

I did quite a few cool projects in my career, but every time I drive at 300km/h on the eurostar to paris, I take a little extra pride into thinking I "did" that :-)