[HN Gopher] The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powe...
___________________________________________________________________
The predecessor to Google Earth was clumsy, yet powerful
Author : croes
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-09-23 07:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| hirundo wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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
| pfrench42 wrote:
| 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!"
| panzagl wrote:
| Is your son now a scriptwriter for 'NCIS'?
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| The article mentions 2001 for Google Earth, but I am pretty
| sure it must have been released later. Wikipedia collaborates
| as much.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| 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?
| khazhoux wrote:
| > 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.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Thanks for this context and history - very helpful.
| [deleted]
| csteubs wrote:
| "Never Lost Again" is an excellent read for anyone curious about
| the origins of Keyhole-become-Google Earth.
| s_gourichon wrote:
| Video from 1994: https://youtu.be/fAsAWoency8
| tdeck wrote:
| 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
| why_only_15 wrote:
| 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/
| jeffbee wrote:
| Netheads vs bellheads is an instance of the superiority of
| the end-to-end principle. https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/p
| ublications/endtoend/endtoe...
| crmd wrote:
| The moral of this story is that, along with great execution, you
| have to get the timing exactly right for disruptive technology.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Watching the video, Google has a display in their visitor center
| with a similar mouse/dial thingy for navigating Google Earth.
| habibur wrote:
| 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
| mc32 wrote:
| Yeah I think they had a deal with Compaq or something for some
| aspect of (commodity) hardware.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| DEC, which Compaq bought. http://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/pa
| pers/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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| tdeck wrote:
| > 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?
| beamatronic wrote:
| "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."
| slacka wrote:
| I haven't read Reamde. What was the opening sequence? The zoom
| In Effect when you pick a local address?
| beamatronic wrote:
| Many people don't realize that Neal Stephenson is referring
| to _his own_ novel, Snow Crash
| sigg3 wrote:
| And it was stolen by Google, apparently.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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)
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I believe it was an intentional reference
| c0nsumer wrote:
| 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.)
| khazhoux wrote:
| Except a court decided they didn't.
|
| This company didn't have a claim on the idea of 3D
| visualization of the planet.
| rhacker wrote:
| 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.
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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.
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-24 23:01 UTC)