The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powerful(vice.com)
vice.com
The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powerful
https://www.vice.com/en/article/53vgbb/the-predecessor-to-google-earth-was-clumsy-yet-powerful
54 comments
Here I thought it would be about NASA WorldWind, a 2003-era project which was sort of like Keyhole but with all sorts of layers for the GOES and Landsat and MODIS imagery.
Some of those layers were updated every 12 or 24 hours, so you could get near-realtime views of stuff like forest fires and crop growth, which are easily visible using specific spectral bands which are imaged by the satellites.
And clouds, of course, updated every few minutes.
Then the project changed directions and it's more of an SDK meant to be baked into other software; the old interface with all its wonder and depth seems to be gone.
Here's what it was like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfxy7mn7mw
Some of those layers were updated every 12 or 24 hours, so you could get near-realtime views of stuff like forest fires and crop growth, which are easily visible using specific spectral bands which are imaged by the satellites.
And clouds, of course, updated every few minutes.
Then the project changed directions and it's more of an SDK meant to be baked into other software; the old interface with all its wonder and depth seems to be gone.
Here's what it was like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfxy7mn7mw
Same here (Keyhole)
Funny story: Back then I was running keyhole with my son who was about five years old. Naturally you want to fly in over your house, so we did that. He saw the house and said "Dad, go run outside!"
Funny story: Back then I was running keyhole with my son who was about five years old. Naturally you want to fly in over your house, so we did that. He saw the house and said "Dad, go run outside!"
Is your son now a scriptwriter for 'NCIS'?
There are systems deployed by the U.S. military because some general or colonel saw Enemy of the State and said "I want that surveillance tech." Look up Gorgon Stare.
Or... we could save people time and link to exactly what you're talking about. And even explain it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
Tldr; The 1998 movie "Enemy of the State" had a fancy eye-in-the-sky drone that inspired military drone surveillance tech developed through DARPA funding and deployed in various systems. One such is known as Gorgon Stare, used on Reaper drones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
Tldr; The 1998 movie "Enemy of the State" had a fancy eye-in-the-sky drone that inspired military drone surveillance tech developed through DARPA funding and deployed in various systems. One such is known as Gorgon Stare, used on Reaper drones.
Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of "Fast Five" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIY5b1JMvGs
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That was my expectation as well. I used Keyhole in the Air Force back in 2004 or so and it was revolutionary at the time.
I had to go to a special closet and print maps from there as it was only installed on one machine.
I had to go to a special closet and print maps from there as it was only installed on one machine.
The article mentions 2001 for Google Earth, but I am pretty sure it must have been released later. Wikipedia collaborates as much.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com
Terraserver was definitely one of those “Wow!” moments of the early web.
Lots of detail on the architecture, in a paper with Jim Gray as a co-author:
https://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/msr_tr_99_29_terras...
One of the hottest applications on the Internet of the time, and they hosted it on 8 servers!
Lots of detail on the architecture, in a paper with Jim Gray as a co-author:
https://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/msr_tr_99_29_terras...
One of the hottest applications on the Internet of the time, and they hosted it on 8 servers!
It would almost be amiss not to mention the amazing work done by Asobo and Microsoft on Flight Simulator 2020 in this context. The whole world has come to life with such beauty as I would never have been able to imagine when I first saw Flight Simulator in the early 80s.
Mind you as children we were perfectly able to fill in the blanks. Yet, the latest version with its highly variable and dynamic weather systems, with spectacular lighting, has really hit the mark for me.
It too uses Microsoft's storage to access data impossible to contain locally in entirety, be it Azure based this time. It would be interesting to learn more about this transition, if related.
Mind you as children we were perfectly able to fill in the blanks. Yet, the latest version with its highly variable and dynamic weather systems, with spectacular lighting, has really hit the mark for me.
It too uses Microsoft's storage to access data impossible to contain locally in entirety, be it Azure based this time. It would be interesting to learn more about this transition, if related.
Yeah I think they had a deal with Compaq or something for some aspect of (commodity) hardware.
DEC, which Compaq bought. http://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/msr_tr_98_17_terrase...
DEC Alpha was the first readily available 64 bit architecture for micro/mini computer sizes. Terraserver was in part a demo of how powerful that was. So was Altavista, the first really successful Web search engine. It started as a DEC research demo program.
DEC Alpha was the first readily available 64 bit architecture for micro/mini computer sizes. Terraserver was in part a demo of how powerful that was. So was Altavista, the first really successful Web search engine. It started as a DEC research demo program.
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.)
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.)
my colleague in the 90s worked in Huntsville, Alabama, and if the story is true, had duties down deep in a bunker where satellite imagery was stored. People whispered it was "the whole Earth" but now we know that there are clouds :-)
interesting story however
interesting story however
If you're into that, NRO published a history of their early years.[1] More on the collection side than the analysis side. In the early years, it was more about collecting imagery of specific areas of interest. Now, there's a flood of imagery of the whole planet to be analyzed. NRO buys most of that from commercial vendors.
Which resulted in NRO getting flak from Congress over the rather large building complex they built out by Dulles Airport.
[1] https://www.nro.gov/History-and-Studies/50th-Anniversary-Arc...
Which resulted in NRO getting flak from Congress over the rather large building complex they built out by Dulles Airport.
[1] https://www.nro.gov/History-and-Studies/50th-Anniversary-Arc...
The plane crash on its doorstep probably didn’t help?
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?
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?
> 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?
Mipmaps were invented in 1983.
Keyhole/Earth used "Clipmaps", invented mid-90s. Clipmaps solved the problem of how to fit gigantic mipmapped textures into memory. Basically, you can keep the lowest LODs in memory always (the zoomed out views), and then Clipmaps show an efficient way for storing the higher resolution as needed.
As an aside, RIP the wonderful people behind both these techniques. Lance Williams passed a few years ago, and Michael Jones just a few months ago. Both were kind, humble, and generous geniuses.
Mipmaps were invented in 1983.
Keyhole/Earth used "Clipmaps", invented mid-90s. Clipmaps solved the problem of how to fit gigantic mipmapped textures into memory. Basically, you can keep the lowest LODs in memory always (the zoomed out views), and then Clipmaps show an efficient way for storing the higher resolution as needed.
As an aside, RIP the wonderful people behind both these techniques. Lance Williams passed a few years ago, and Michael Jones just a few months ago. Both were kind, humble, and generous geniuses.
Thanks for this context and history - very helpful.
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> 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?
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...
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 haven't read Reamde. What was the opening sequence? The zoom In Effect when you pick a local address?
Many people don't realize that Neal Stephenson is referring to his own novel, Snow Crash
"Snow Crash" is awesome at so many levels - including inventing what is now Google Earth. I've read it once and listened to the audio book twice. And will again.
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?
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.
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's a very impressive video. It's interesting that they used ATM networking, which also showed promise but didn't really take off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode
ATM was the baselevel for DSL for a long time. You'd usually run Ethernet over ATM, and often PPP over Ethernet (over ATM). If you carefully tweaked your MTUs, you could get a marginal latency benefit by fully packing the underlying fixed-length ATM packets.
This[0] is one of my favorite articles ever, about the competition between IP and ATM in the 90s and the different mindsets they had.
[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
Netheads vs bellheads is an instance of the superiority of the end-to-end principle. https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoe...
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.
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.
The globe looks like a demo or trade show prop, when practical consumer trackballs were on the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball
"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.
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.
Google Earth wasn't until 2004? What the hell was I using before that (2002-2003)?
And it was stolen by Google, apparently.
Not exactly: https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/
One of my favorite coincidences is how the mapping startup has the same name as NRO’s series of orbital surveillance platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
This is also where the “K” in “KML” comes from (Keyhole Markup Language)
One of my favorite coincidences is how the mapping startup has the same name as NRO’s series of orbital surveillance platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
This is also where the “K” in “KML” comes from (Keyhole Markup Language)
Probably not a coincidence. The Keyhole name was in the public realm prior to this. (It'd been used within the intelligence community since the late 50s.)
I believe it was an intentional reference
Except a court decided they didn't.
This company didn't have a claim on the idea of 3D visualization of the planet.
This company didn't have a claim on the idea of 3D visualization of the planet.
By Jury. And at the time Google was a highly popular company. I still think a lot of large companies get away with stealing the candy from others.
But Keyhole did not steal anyone's candy. The origin for the product (and I'm paraphrasing the story here, secondhand) was actually SGI'ers had developed a method for efficiently rendering gigantic textures at multiple levels of detail. They looked for the largest texture they could find for their demos, and that turned out to be high-res terrestrial imagery. This demo app then turned into the Keyhole product itself.
This technology was developed inside the world's leading computer graphics company, where people spent 24/7 thinking about how to render 3D graphics and textures better, faster, at higher resolutions. And Keyhole was merely a 3d app that happened to be showing the planet. The other company did not have a valid claim against that.
This technology was developed inside the world's leading computer graphics company, where people spent 24/7 thinking about how to render 3D graphics and textures better, faster, at higher resolutions. And Keyhole was merely a 3d app that happened to be showing the planet. The other company did not have a valid claim against that.
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.