As I wind down my blog posts and I quit socials, perhaps this may be a good time to reflect on my Web journey that started almost 40 years ago (a recap of my IT journey is here)...
But wait... Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent it til just over 35 years ago (Wikipedia)! That's because I had a site dubbed HTTP in 1986, see inset below: "world wide web" hadn't been coined yet, but I knew as a student at late 70's University of Calgary of Ted Nelson's failed Project Xanadu (Wikipedia), to try and link all forms of knowledge via hypertext; it failed partly due to Nelson's eccentricity, partly because there was no global network to carry it.
AI had been likewise around for a long time, but didn't catch on until the Cloud as it's called now offered both the infrastructure and the (largely pilfered) knowledge-base to be developed on. Did you know I had a joint-venture Cal-CAD with a small Calgary CAN company Teknica, that had an Expert System, Tekxpert forerunner of AI? It codified Earth Sciences knowledge to help interpret vast troves of geo-info in a so-called client-server environment of desktop workstations polling private & public databases on matching networks. Did you also know the then government telco optically wired Calgary for free to link all this up, betting they'd recoup the investment via net traffic? That it did handsomely I heard... I benefitted from it by creating an early pre-website. Thanks are due to a brilliant surveyor Bill McKenzie, who helped my joint-venture and introduced me to scripting and later helped me create what one might call a proto-GIS (ResearchGate).
Autodesk's Roger Walker eventually bought Project Xanadu out but never capitalized on it. How do I know this? My joint venture failed and I joined a CD publishing startup, CD PubCo to put all Westen Canada petroleum exploration data on one CD, and production data on another using a Texas School Board hashing algorithm. CDs were so rare in the mid-80s that we leased readers with data CDs, that were way better than waiting for 9600bps modems to access data... remember were pre-WWW still! This was all accessed via a text-based interface: I suggested map interface may help, based on my previous failed venture; my boss disagreed and we parted ways, even tho I had found not only a mapping but also a then-nascent web partner StrataWeb. When I joined another small engg. firm Munro Garrett, lo&behold I find that same web team! They had an early GIS (Wikipedia) that couldn't compete with market leader ESRI, but the web team joined AutoDesk to create MapGuide that eventually didn't stack up against ESRI either. I went onto Landmark then Halliburton who had their GIS called OpenExplorer, then onto ESRI itself after Y2K. I continued doing web maps on various platforms like Google, GIScloud, Mapcentia, Amazon Web Services and arcgis.com, see bottom inset.
I used web maps & tutorials (G-drive) to help citizen science: show how easy it is to access free public data, and to create you own maps on (almost) free software.
That is my short story on the web since before its existence. So what did this all look like? The beauty of the web is that it's very cheap & easy to implement, if you have basic scripting skills and an Internet to connect to. I have no formal comp. sci. training, but eight years of French high school Latin taught me to be able to read, fix & then write scripts, first in Unix databases then in Java on the web. So here is a rogue's gallery of my websites from 1986 to 2006 (click all images to enlarge):
Note that Professional Portfolio is greyed out: I had quite a library of Esri web maps and map stories I had to relinquish, as monthly costs exceeded my disposable income; this was because I bird-dogged several guv websites, where the data was so poorly posted (like text in lieu of numbers, links to be manually updated each update cycle, etc.) that I had to re-post them after fixing them... even for East Anglia my limited area of interest, that created a significant amount of data! Now I just create print maps for static public displays such as here, or as YouTube videos for dynamic ones here.
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