The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powerful

I thought this would be about Keyhole. I was a Keyhole user when Google acquired it in 2004 and turned it into Google Earth.

https://archive.is/ynMIR

At the time I thought it was one of the most spectacular pieces of software I'd ever seen. Google hasn't changed that.

In between the 10 years of these two releases, there was also Microsoft's TerraServer, more like google earth but wanted to show MS SQL server's power of being able to store terrabytes of data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com

I first saw that kind of technology in my aerospace days, around 1983. One day I was shown into a classified area, and got to try a rack of custom built special purpose hardware used for analyzing aerial imagery. There was a screen, a trackball, a knob, and a lever. Pan with the trackball, rotate the image with the knob, and zoom it with the lever. It was nicely done; no artifacts and no lag. One of the people in my department worked on extending it to larger areas of imagery, and he said it got much easier once they realized it could be viewed as a virtual memory system.

I'm not sure who the customer was. I just saw the prototype and wasn't involved with that project. At the time, imagery analysts usually used big photographs and magnifying glasses, as they'd been doing since WWII. This was the beginning of computerizing that process.

So this was being done, expensively, decades before it became a consumer product.

(DoD R&D was like that back then - very expensive one-off designs to solve specific hard problems. This was before "commercial off the shelf technology" overtook the DoD one-offs.)

Man - when you are claiming 10 year old tech was stolen...

I'm sure this will get the clickbait headlines and comments around google "stealing" someone's idea.

To at least a bit ahead of things

They did "terravision" which never went that far in 1994?

They sued claiming their tech was stolen in 2014 (20 years later).

Patent was re-issued twice, so they filed in 1996, then did a re-issue in 2010, then had to do another re-issue in 2013.

The claims are things like

The method of pictorial representation in claim 2, further including determining the coordinates of the data in a new coordinate system

The claims they were accused of violating were found to be invalid. This went to jury trial.

Patents are great, but the more I read software patents, maybe they should be limited to something like 6 years.

To be clear - I think it IS possible that their stuff was "stolen" - in the sense that a number of people probably have had ideas of maps in computers, I know I had an old multi-cd encyclopedia that I think actually had a cool spinning globe which was cutting edge back in day. Their zoom in piece looks like the most unique (sets of more detailed tiles).

I'm not sure when level of detail methods came out really, I know in gaming they were around for a while and there was a terrain generator as well that made great terrain that had some level of detail stuff. Perhaps this was in fact novel?

> But it never took off in the way Google Earth later would, in 2001.

This makes it sound like there's some big mystery here. Is it really surprising that a free tool you could download in the 2000s took off where a commercial CD-ROM product from the mid 90s did not? How many people in 1994 would even have machines that could support such a visualization?

I remember an earlier article on Terraserver [1] where they made an interesting observation that each morning when the east coast woke up the corresponding DC would get a rise in temperature.

And that their logs clearly showed that the first thing anyone looked at was where they lived, where they shopped and other things near them.

So my interpretation was that Microsoft back then were so focused on showing off their SQL server that they didn't even understand the treasure of personal data they had in their hand.

1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terraserve...

"The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel."

I find most comments here misplaced.

Art + COM build something awesome, way ahead of their time. Did Google steal it? A US Jury court sayed no ... I mean even Apple won in the first instance about their black rectangle patent (it took the second to rectify that). People here seem to forget that courts are not about justice, they are midigators.

Was google so inspired by it that they have the same setup (with the same interactions) in their headquarter ? Yes.

Shouldn't our society value more people who build awesome stuff?

A good book about the early days of Google maps and the Keyhole company that originally built it is "Never Lost Again" by Bill Kilday.

The author was one of the founders[1] of Keyhole and stayed on when the company was bought by google.

[1] This might technically be wrong, but he was working for them from almost day one.

I used this system or something similar at Siggraph in LA, late 90s. It was running on big iron from SGI. Was gobsmacked to fly from orbit into Dodger Stadium in one long zoom. :D

Video from 1994: https://youtu.be/fAsAWoency8

That globe is absolutely enormous. Was the expectation that people were so familiar with a physical globe that it must be the best interaction device? It doesn’t make sense to me once you get past 1x zoom.

As far as Google earth goes, I remember using nasa world wind before I had ever heard of Google earth. At the time that earth came out, nasa had the leg up.

"Never Lost Again" is an excellent read for anyone curious about the origins of Keyhole-become-Google Earth.

The dual interfaces of the knob and the exercise ball looking thing are interesting.

I found Google Earth in VR hard to use. Maybe a more direct interface like this would have been better.

Watching the video, Google has a display in their visitor center with a similar mouse/dial thingy for navigating Google Earth.

The moral of this story is that, along with great execution, you have to get the timing exactly right for disruptive technology.

Google Earth wasn't until 2004? What the hell was I using before that (2002-2003)?

And it was stolen by Google, apparently.