I remember working at a company in the early 2000s that did a bit of GIS work and getting a copy of Keyhole. It was absolutely mindblowing at the time. I remember spending an hour or so after work nearly every day for a few weeks just browsing around the globe and looking at places all over the world.
There was absolutely nothing like it anywhere, this was even before Google Maps was a thing and most people printed out directions, on paper, from mapquest.com. The Motorola Razr flip phone still hadn't been released. This was absolutely impossible technology from the future. Lots of the senior technical people I worked with used to spend their lunches trying to figure out the architecture Keyhole used to stream the map data. And then they'd spend their coffee breaks trying to figure out how they got all that to run performantly on the primitive graphics hardware we had in the "Keyhole" desktop -- which somebody took to one of our conference rooms and hooked up to a projector and gave people wall-sized flying tours of the Earth.
What's amazing to me is that even after Google acquired it, the capabilities haven't become significantly better than that original tool. Sure it's been cleaned up, and better data tiles, more POI, etc. They added 3d buildings and so on. But it's still entirely recognizable as that original software -- after two decades.
I remember wanting to have it at home, but it was prohibitively expensive, and then NASA released WorldWind [1] which was achingly close but never quite got the high resolution map data that Keyhole did at the time.
There was absolutely nothing like it anywhere, this was even before Google Maps was a thing and most people printed out directions, on paper, from mapquest.com. The Motorola Razr flip phone still hadn't been released. This was absolutely impossible technology from the future. Lots of the senior technical people I worked with used to spend their lunches trying to figure out the architecture Keyhole used to stream the map data. And then they'd spend their coffee breaks trying to figure out how they got all that to run performantly on the primitive graphics hardware we had in the "Keyhole" desktop -- which somebody took to one of our conference rooms and hooked up to a projector and gave people wall-sized flying tours of the Earth.
What's amazing to me is that even after Google acquired it, the capabilities haven't become significantly better than that original tool. Sure it's been cleaned up, and better data tiles, more POI, etc. They added 3d buildings and so on. But it's still entirely recognizable as that original software -- after two decades.
I remember wanting to have it at home, but it was prohibitively expensive, and then NASA released WorldWind [1] which was achingly close but never quite got the high resolution map data that Keyhole did at the time.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_WorldWind