Gregory's ServerMaybe it's a good time to mention that the grant I got for my PhD research is a project collecting documents and oral histories of GIS software development. Materials collected will eventually be accessioned to the Computer History Museum. If you work/have worked on GIS tools (web mapping is part of it!!) I would love to talk to you!!
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 @ingrid Oh there we go! https://web.archive.org/web/20050206033808/http://www.southwestdata.org/tools/contact/contact.shtml Bill died, Randy I think is still around my hometown, Karen moved to Oregon and started Off Piste Magazine and might be able to be found. There's a couple other people who were involved but never a part of the organization on the ISP side — my boss and the former owner the ISP; me; and the original owner of OurayNet who is now off in Hawaii. @ingrid And https://web.archive.org/web/19961220091746/http://landuse.com/ is even older part of that work.  @ingrid Worldwide? I started in 1990 in the UK in one of the national GIS labs set up for social science/health research. First job was implementing spatial stats in ARC/INFO... @geospacedman I'm looking a bit more at the industry side than government but user stories and gov adoption is certainly relevant  @richlv @geospacedman yes! would very much like to avoid academic geography's weird tendency to treat OSM and open source mapping stuff as some weird alternate dimension of GIS @ingrid @geospacedman And the corporate history cannot be always trusted - somebody 50 years later could stumble upon this quote from an Apple manager and have an utterly incorrect impression… https://en.osm.town/@SK53/110864447079543025 @ingrid @tsherrygeo No GIS software development, but my first office job was digitising paper maps showing the sewer systems of the North West of England… Many moons ago!  @ingrid Reach out to Miriam https://library.yale.edu/people/miriam-olivares - she’s been in this field for a while and may know others you should talk to @ingrid @sigte_udg organized the conference where the QGIS 3.0 was developed. The version is called Girona because it was held in that Catalan city. https://www.udg.edu/en/sigte @ingrid we might have some interesting software from our early days of working with satellite data. Great project regardless ☺️ @ingrid In 1997 and 1998 I worked at the Houston Chronicle. One of my jobs was deploying and maintaining a directory of businesses with location mapping. We used census data maps, and some pretty rudimentary location data. @ingrid hell yeah this fucking rules!!! Hope you get someone to talk to you about the development of StoryMaps because I’m totally fascinated by the framing/rhetoric around StoryMaps from ESRI @ingrid My friend suggests you speak to: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/lindenbeekeeping as they worked on Computer Vision -> Unisys (System 9) -> Spatialware/Mapinfo aka System 9 GIS  @ingrid @beadsland I’d love to talk about the book I edited of one of Ian McHarg’s lost lectures. Ian McHarg: Conversations with Students / Dwelling in Nature https://a.co/d/bGDCOYB @susannahkirby @ingrid ah I don't think anything I've worked on is as cool or interesting as the work of some of the many cool & interesting folks I've worked *with*! Boosting for reach, I know they're out here 👀 Late 80s / early 90s may be late for a GIS in general, but this one was the first I really saw pushed out to general use computers (because it was supposed to be used by firefighters): @ingrid @ingrid sounds like an interesting project. I'd be glad to make some intros to some folks at UC Santa Barbara, Esri, or neogeo/FOSS4G/OpenGeo, if you don't already have connections to those worlds... Feel free to DM me (if that's a thing on Mastodon) or dda@dara-abrams.com @ingrid I'm no GIS celebrity but first job out of college was making web maps for the NWS, tilted at windmills with OS X geotagging shareware for a while, got to hang out with GeoLoqi folks and do some "Cloud Cartography" WebGL experiments at the next job, tilted at windmills processing satellite images after that, contributed a bit to Polymaps and D3 and now Leaflet most recently. @ingrid I studied surveying and GIS in the 90ies. Perhaps I have some stories to tell? @ingrid Are you aware of https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ ( Documents and citations) and https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Citation_Repository#Historic_citations ( the scanned documents go back to 1989)? Maybe ping @neteler, he might know more, especially GRASS- and OSGeo-related. @OtoKalab @ingrid https://twitter.com/drpeterloewe is making such collection for the german library (well, basically mostly written and digitized material) I could give you many names, but best is, you just start with Sol Katz Award list https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sol_Katz_Award and move further to OSGeo board members https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors#History_of_OSGeo_Foundation_Boards_of_Directors @ingrid not sure if this is in the scope, but a uni friend and I once built a pedestrian navigation system for Daimler. It was serving mobile phone users in Berlin using WAP and was deployed at IBM in ca. 2000. The navigation data came from some XML-based API provided by Daimler and was targeting cars IIRC, so had to be “translated” for pedestrians. I remember some headaches recognising roundabouts because Daimler’s API would serve those as multiple right turns in a row…  @ingrid I released a customizable, shareware web map thing in Flash back in 2004. https://backspace.com/mapapp/ |
@ingrid Oh geez, I think some of the people I worked with died, but we were doing web accessible maps of county land use in 1997(I think), the ISP I worked with in concert with a weird little non profit ("Southwest Data Center") and Ouray County, Colorado. I might be able to scare up some contacts if I shake my memory hard enough.