Krisztián
Ingrid BurringtonMaybe 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!!
Mx. Aria Stewart@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.
@aredridel OMG amazing
@ingrid Some major bit rot, but https://web.archive.org/web/20050317074718/http://www.southwestdata.org/data/data.shtml
@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.
Barry Rowlingson@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
Rihards Olups@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
SK53 (@[email protected])
Rather gushing #Guardian article celebrating 10 years of Apple Maps https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/aug/09/apple-maps-cycling-transport-google ""As Cue himself recognises, “there are really only two mapmakers left in the world, in ourselves and Google” – and that monopoly of information, says Clancy Wilmott, a professor specialising in digital cartographies at Berkley, has consequences."" #AppleMaps #10thAnniversary
nk@ingrid oh mannnn we used to spend time in proximity with Scott Morehouse those were wild stories. I bet Amber Case would have some gems.
@ingrid I mean or if you could track down Morehouse for a couple hours but I’m not sure what he’s up too these days
MrJoshua@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!
Tim N7KOM
Bill
…might work for coffee…Maybe interesting to you and you might be able to help :)
Sarah E Bourne@sbourne thank you!
apgarcia
Bernhard E. Reiter@apgarcia @ingrid .. at least https://intevation.de/~bernhard/archiv/uwm/ still has my term paper for the GIS course on how to get GRASS running on 64 bit in 1999. And https://web.archive.org/web/20180506202014/http://freegis.org/ the last snapshot of FreeGIS.org :) #FreeSoftware
Dr. Divya 🍉 is offline
Dr. Fred Calef III@divya @ingrid Hi Ingrid! I’m the originator of MMGIS (https://github.com/NASA-AMMOS/MMGIS). Happy to chat sometime. I’ve also worked in GIS for 30 years, so have seen and experience the GIS evolution.
GitHub - NASA-AMMOS/MMGIS: Multi-Mission Geographical Information System - Web-based Mapping and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Planetary Science Operations - https://nasa-ammos.github.io/MMGIS/
Multi-Mission Geographical Information System - Web-based Mapping and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Planetary Science Operations - https://nasa-ammos.github.io/MMGIS/ - NASA-AMMOS/MMGIS
Josep Pueyo-Ros 
@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
Development Seed@ingrid we might have some interesting software from our early days of working with satellite data. Great project regardless ☺️
@developmentseed would love to chat for sure!
Groms
cratermoon@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.
Dr Sukes
@sara@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 👀
Rich Puchalsky 
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):
MichaelIf the name David Simonett rings a bell, I was his executive assistant when he was a dean at UCSB. drop me a DM if you want to talk. He was a fascinating guy. I learned a lot from him, none of it GIS-related, unfortunately.
ابراهیم 
@ingrid
I'm not sure if they're elligible but I made bunch of small OSM-related softwares:
https://github.com/dearrude/osm-detective
I'm not sure if they're elligible but I made bunch of small OSM-related softwares:
https://github.com/dearrude/osm-detective
Nathan Vander Wilt@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.
M-A, Mar
die_christine@ingrid I studied surveying and GIS in the 90ies. Perhaps I have some stories to tell?
Katja@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.
Oto Kaláb
Jachym Cepicky@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
Geomob
Bastian Blankenburg 🤝 🛡@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…
atloniM@ingrid Someone linked me this and while I personally couldn't contribute, it might be worth talking to Bruce Gittings, at Edinburgh University. He created (invented?!) the first distributed GIS Web Map in 1997 - https://web.archive.org/web/19971015000000*/http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/quakes/quakes.html
From his lectures, it had an interesting history and even involved in some legal battles setting precedents regarding IP (he could definitely explain it better though).
John Emerson@ingrid I released a customizable, shareware web map thing in Flash back in 2004. https://backspace.com/mapapp/
penguin42@ingrid Are you aware of the BBC Domesday educational system in the UK from the mid 80's? It wasn't a traditional formal GIS, but an educational tool using some fairly wacky tech for the time; https://www.domesday86.com
Alberto Cottica
Mark C Marino
LillyLyle/Count Melancholia@ingrid Hi Ingrid. Some people I worked with at Geosciences in Edinburgh did a lot of pioneering work with GIS. If you like I can give you some contact details. Where are you working on this?
Joseph Elfelt@ingrid GISsurfer is a general purpose web map with broad support for displaying GIS data. I am the developer.
https://gissurfer.com
https://gissurfer.com
Kate Nyhan is changing servers@ingrid I only know this from the outside, but maybe you can get some info about Kurt Menke's Community Health Maps, which used to be supported by the National Library of Medicine.
The Ghost of Toots Passed@ingrid
I worked for a wireless ISP in 2001-2003 and somehow got mixed up in Mapinfo/decibel planner/MapXtreme. Not a lot to tell but MapInfo ended up following me around for quite a number of years afterward.
I worked for a wireless ISP in 2001-2003 and somehow got mixed up in Mapinfo/decibel planner/MapXtreme. Not a lot to tell but MapInfo ended up following me around for quite a number of years afterward.