Petroleum GIS then and now

Exprodat published a free eBook: Why use GIS in petroleum?, an excellent state-of-play as well as good industry marketing to augment their impressive blog. Does their Figure 1 not have a certain air of déjà vu, however, compared to Figure 1 of my article in CADalyst written 25 years ago?

click on image to enlarge

Those were however very different days! AutoCAD was a front-end on pre-Windows PCs just entering a Unix workstation market. Just trying to connect with Sun workstations or download data over 9600 baud modems - that's 1.2 kbps or 1000 times slower than a 1 mbps line today - to create a township grid and overlay data in prehistoric mashups for proximity analysis... And Operation Database was still two years away from stating: "Geographic information systems are infrequently used in exploration and production, which represents less than 2% of the total GIS sphere"... And the web? What web?

Mar88CADalyst

As a footnote, the PC in Figure 3 is the basis for the following comparison:

Mega giga