
Microsoft Invented Google Earth in the 90s, Then Blew It - jimsojim
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/microsofts-terraserver-was-google-earth-before-there-was-google-earth
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jbuzbee
Microsoft invented it? I recall working on a digital mapping system in the
late 80's that was very similar. We had a very large drum scanner that we used
to scan paper maps and imagery at various scales. First we'd rectify the
result, then we'd do a color reduction to both cut down the file size and to
match the capabilities of the machines of the day. Next we'd slice the image
up into 128x128 pixel tiles and assemble the result into a database of various
scales that allowed a user to zoom, pan from map to map, overlay symbology,
etc. At the time we were working with 300 MB drives, so we were very
restricted and had to create specific databases that matched a user's need.

~~~
vog
That's very interesting. How was the digital mapping system named? Which
company did you work for? Who were the customers?

~~~
jbuzbee
I named it. I called it the "Digital Application Map Manager" or DAMM. That
way my boss had to ask "When will those DAMM maps be ready?". We had a sub-
contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but the ultimate customer was the
US Army.

~~~
javajosh
Having worked on one or two SIBR proposals, I appreciate a good (mis)use of
the government's perverse acronym fetish. Bravo!

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ghshephard
Important to note that there were a _lot_ of mapping companies in the
90s/early 2000s, but the breakthroughs were really Google acquiring a number
of mapping companies like Keyhole, where2. The big leap forward, of course,
was the hyper responsive Ajax interface that google introduced around 2004.

~~~
johansch
Yeah. The seamless "scrolling a map in a browser thing" blew everyone's mind.
It did a lot in cementing the image of Google as a visionary company.

~~~
jbuzbee
Oh yeah. I remember when Google Maps first came out. Nobody thought that this
degree of interactivity was even feasible in a browser. It was really
revolutionary.

~~~
nashashmi
revolutionary ...

The emergence and craze of AJAX blew everyone away after that point. People
realized there was a thing called XMLHTTPrequest. That technology had been my
dream ever since I learned HTML. The tech came out in 1996 by Microsoft and
nobody used it until 2003.

At this time, Firefox took the torch of keeping the web moving forward. So a
whole buzz around web tech reignited.

Those were my days of inspiration.

~~~
mikepurvis
Ironically, though, the original Google Maps didn't actually use
XMLHTTPRequest, at least not for the trackable maps— that was all just moving
<img> tags around and changing the src attributes on them.

XHR may have been used to fetch search results, although it later switched to
a JSONP interface with generated script tags so that the various APIs
(geocoding, directions, etc) could be used by third party sites on other
domains.

~~~
frik
Ironically, neither Google Maps nor Google Mail (GMail) used
AJAX/XMLHTTPRequest in their first version. The first Google product that used
AJAX came later, it was Google Instant Search (search box improvement). Google
Maps and GMAIL used hidden iframes to load data in the background. Around
2004/5 only Internet Explorer 5+ and very recent Mozilla builds supported
XMLHTTPRequest (without bugs). As far as I remember Maps and GMail switched to
AJAX approach around 2006.

~~~
da1
Indeed hidden iframes were the original way in which these effects were
implemented.

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rwmj
I used this and it was incredibly slow. Clicking the arrow buttons moved the
map by a fixed amount. In my opinion the breakthrough of Google Maps was the
Javascript interface that let you slide around and zoom in and out, plus the
engineering behind it that served the map tiles quickly.

~~~
johansch
I also used it just when it was introduced, but with a 2 Mbit/s uplink at
work. And a 10 Mbit/s student residential uplink at home connected to a 34
Mbit/s link that the Linköping University had via Swedish University Network
(SUNET). (Back then 34 Mbit/s was something fantastic!) I probably used a P133
with Linux at home and a 110 Mhz Sparc 5 at work. And Netscape was the browser
in both cases.

My vague memory from then is that the server was super slow, and that my
connection wasn't the limiting factor. Still, it was fascinating to play with
for a few hours.

This was before P2P pirating was a big thing. Pirating was mostly done via SMB
shares in the local network (no-one was afraid of getting caught since the
authorities had no clue at all, and also because it felt like we were
spearheading something new and interesting), so the external link didn't
suffer. Online video at that time was like 50 kbps RealVideo streams, at most.

~~~
rev_bird
>Back then 34 Mbit/s was something fantastic!

I can't even get 34 Mbps _now_. This was 20 years ago?

~~~
johansch
Well, it was shared by like 20k (occasional) users and 1-2k students with
campus Ethernet network connections. (Still, it never really got saturated.
There wasn't that many interesting AND bandwidth-consuming services out there
in the rest of the world.)

I think Sweden was quite good at getting people connected at decent speeds. In
retrospect, I think this was a very wise way to spend tax money.

My personal Internet-connection history goes like this:

1994: 28.8 kbps modem at home in a small village. It cost like $2/hour.

1996: 10 Mbit/s - residential student university network, for like $10/month

2000: 10 Mbit/s - moved away from the student area to an apartment with a
commercial connection (Bredbandsbolaget - they got loads of investements, some
of it in the form of hardware from Cisco). $30/month

2002: Upgraded to 100 Mbit/s. $30/month

2009: My homeowner association accepts a 10 year deal where all apartments get
100 Mbit/s Ethernet-based access for $10/month (in exchange for "monopoly" \-
everyone needs to pay $10).

(Since 1996, it's been all direct Ethernet, no silly old stuff like DSL or
cable.)

~~~
dalke
"There wasn't that many interesting AND bandwidth-consuming services out there
in the rest of the world."

MIT had a video capture system. If you told it your IP address, and did the
xhost + correctly (we were so trusting back then), it would pop up an X window
on your machine and show video. We watched part of the 1994 World Cup that
way, at a few frames per second and 1/3rd of a continent away. And no sound.

Regarding network in Sweden, part of me drools over the $100/month 1Gbit/s
offerings from Com Hem and Bredbandbolaget. The bigger part of me wonders if
the extra bandwidth would be worthwhile.

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carbocation
This headline is pernicious clickbait. Why not say "Microsoft Invented a
Google Earth precursor, but never took it seriously"? Because that would not
force you to click through to understand how they "totally blew it."

Spoiler alert: They built TeraServer map service to demonstrate that their
database product could handle a terabyte or more of data. They got tons of
user interest, but didn't use the information they got from searches or the
user emails to iterate on their project. They could have developed a dominant
mapping service (the author's thesis, sort of), but they let the project
languish.

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brwnll
"According to a USA Today article from June 22, 1998, the initial plan with
Terraserver was to list every single transaction in the history of the New
York Stock Exchange online and make it searchable. But that was only a half
terabyte of data. Microsoft needed something larger."

I'd be curious to see what the size of that collection is now, post advent of
high frequency trading.

Side note, the article in no way explains why Google Earth would be considered
a success story. The lead engineer from this project went on to Bing Maps,
it's not as if MS decided geographic data wasn't worth doing.

~~~
consz
The US equity market does about 4b in transactions a day; let's say the
average trade size is $1000 dollars (probably an aggressive estimate; I'd
expect it actually to be higher), and you record the ticker (4bytes) +
price(8) + quantity(8) for all the transactions, you'd get --

(4+8+8) _(4e9 /1000) _ 252 (trading days) / 1e9 = 20GB/year

lets say you have these for 100 years, you'd still only have 2TB. And this if
for the _entire_ US equity market -- NYSE is only one of 11 protected
exchanges (and only trades tape A), so the above estimates are pretty
optimistic.

Now, if you wanted to record every _message_ and not just every transaction,
then you get into serious data (on the order of ~2-5TB/day).

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ics
Heh, I remember TerraServer. It was pretty amazing to me at the time (late
'90s), the first thing I did was find my grandparents' property and sure
enough saw a few shadowy figures which might as well have been me with them
and the dog given the date on the tile. When Google Maps (and maybe MapQuest
too?) started doing maps _in color_ I was a suitably impressed kid.

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JonFish85
I almost feel bad for Microsoft. I think they were far ahead of their time in
many ways, and ended up getting in trouble for it.

They had some pretty cool tablets, but unfortunately the hardware / internet
infrastructure wasn't really there to support it. They were the first (major
at least) to build an OS underpinned by a browser. They were early to the game
of running a real OS on a phone.

Unfortunately they weren't really able to take advantage of those. They seem
slow to get into the tablet game the 2nd time around, and even now they're
still playing catch-up (although I've heard the Surface things are pretty
good). Their phones are consistently underachieving for whatever reason.
They're still struggling to find the right model for Windows ever since XP/7
(I think they've finally gotten on board with the Apple model of the OS is
freely updatable, but I'm not 100% sure of that).

They've done some great work, but man, they can't seem to get out of their own
way sometimes.

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frik
The TerraServer project split into two branches, read both Wikipedia pages:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraServer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraServer)

Also NASA World Wind got popular, just before Google Earth, and was initially
more advanced:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind)

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mentos
I completely forgot about the response to aerial photography when it first
came out. I remember having some concerns about the privacy implications and
feeling 'exposed' on the internet that anyone could see my home. Funny how
much my mindset has changed.

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eterm
Except if you look at the screenshots, there's no information.

That's the key thing with google maps or google earth, it's the information
around what you're looking at that is important, and google understood that.

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BorisMelnik
I remember using this on my first 486, maybe a 386 on a CD that came bundled
with Microsoft Encarta. This was just a hair before the internet started
taking off on modems and such, I beleive we might have had an internet
connection but it was still at the point where sharing floppy's and CD's were
the best way to share software.

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spilk
Heck, Google didn't even invent Google Earth, they bought a company named
Keyhole and renamed it.

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ChrisNorstrom
Fun Fact:

Microsoft had Instant IMAGE Search over 10 years ago when they launched the
live.com product (if anyone remembers). Much much before google had instant
web search. Start typing and images would instantly fill the screen. This was
at a time when AJAX was getting popular. Like a lot of cool Microsoft tech,
they didn't invest in it for the long run and just killed it along with EXPO,
the craigslist competitor.

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sammydavis
I am sure there were other things like this kicking around at the time as
people have been discussing. I worked on improving the performance of the
terraserver project a little bit. I was part of the team that designed and
wrote sql server 7.0 (a db rewrite from scratch of the purchased sybase,
including parser, optimizer, QE, storage engine, but keeping the stored
procedure programming language that was from sybase). I believe this was 1998.

We all knew it was a pretty impressive combination of maps, jpeg image,
software and web browsers. Microsoft definitely had an idea that they didn't
want to make the web too great, because that could lessen the importance of
windows. As others say, Microsoft didn't know what they had with ajax.

I remember this was one of the first, early, high query examples we had, other
than tpcc and tpcd. There was a stored procedure call in the application that
accidentally lead to basically a lock that was held, blocking everything else.
That was a really hard problem to figure out.

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superkuh
I used terraserver to manually download the entire tile set for my town (right
click, save as). Then I laboriously used Photoshop 5 to align and remove the
watermarks. It took an entire week but by the end I had a clean ~150 MB jpg
that I could scroll around in as needed.

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benkant
We were writing web based GIS in 1996, using ESRI's MapObjects IMS. Tiling,
projections, yes these were solved problems by then using available commercial
software.

We were storing data in Oracle or DB/2 with ESRI's SDE sitting on top, because
at that time no mainstream RDBMS had spatial types.

I don't recall if SDE supported SQL Server back then. That aside, you could
have built TerraServer with COTS tech in 1997.

TerraServer was impressive due to being publically available. Nothing we built
at the time was available to the public as far as I remember. But it existed.

And that's just web based stuff, which really is the easy part. Large scale
GIS had been around for decades prior.

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varelse
They're not the only ones apparently:

[http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/origination-of-
googl...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/origination-of-google-earth-
focus-of-patent-infringement-lawsuit-by-artcom-innovationpool-246345841.html)

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TazeTSchnitzel
They invented Google Earth, yes, but looking at satellite images is mostly a
novelty unless you're searching for concentration camps in North Korea or
nuclear plants in Israel.

Google Maps is a much more generally useful product. And Microsoft was well
ahead of Google, they sold numerous offline mapping products.

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webaholic
How I wish MSFT executives were more competitive and less dismissive of non-OS
related technologies back in the day. I am really glad that things are quite
different today and they are -atleast- competing with other tech companies if
not leading them.

~~~
nashashmi
I wish they were more open to let the whole world use the standards they set.
MS was an amazing platform company they set some of the greatest standards we
have come to known. It is sad to see those standards hit the dust in the face
of more inviting technologies.

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EA
AFAIK, Microsoft used public (US Government) imagery. Google bought Keyhole
and that enabled them to own the sensors which gave them more power in terms
of capturing content.

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pierotofy
If you're interested in developing virtual globe applications, take a look at
[http://cesiumjs.org](http://cesiumjs.org)

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lhecker
Whenever I read stories like this about Microsoft I have to chuckle about all
the similarities to Aperture-Science from Portal 2...

~~~
Piko
It's been a while since I played the series, but what similarities exist
there?

~~~
kuschku
Developing all kind of cool tech, but never releasing it?

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juhq
I remember that good old around year 2000 Microsoft web design playing with
them fonts and such. Ah, good memories!

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bambax
> _Microsoft, the corporation, didn 't seem to care very little about..._

Very _much_.

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yaymicrosoft
Microsoft Invented Google Chrome in the 90s, Then Blew It.. Eleven times.

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redml
Microsoft's focus in the 90s was to kill Netscape, they never had a grand
vision for the internet.

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pcunite
Wow, I had totally forgotten about Terra server. I remember this now.

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HillaryBriss
SQL Server Rocks!

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X-Factor
Similarly, The first pc user interface was created in Xerox Labs, But Apple
was the first realizing its importance.

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13of40
I use Google Earth almost daily, and they've never made a penny off of me. It
doesn't even have in-app ads. I guess these days "Totally Blew It" means
"Wisely decided not to spend the next two decades hemorrhaging money on the
thing."

~~~
fizzbatter
So you think Google has been needlessly hemorrhaging money for two decades?
Seems like an odd statement.

Clearly Google sees the value in it. Even if it is simply brand identity, or
"vendor lockin" _(for lack of a better description)_. Clearly there is
something that is very meaningful to Google to do it.

I bet there are a ton of companies that would love to have their maps product
as the "maps app" of choice by the masses. Likewise, i'm sure Microsoft would
love if i had to login to bing every time i used Navigation, compared to me
__never using bing for anything ever __. So yea, i don 't think "Totally Blew
It" is that far off the mark.

~~~
johansch
To list just one value: Google maps is a very strong reason why Android device
manufacturers feel like they need to go with a Google-service model and follow
Google's requirements, rather than do it Amazon Fire style. This alone is
worth billions in search revenue. (And Google was smart enough to let it take
a decade for this value to materialize.)

