See what you started Meg?
I started in the late 90’s with Intergraph MGE at CRCOG. MGE ran on top of or at least used Microstation as its editing platform. They came out with GeoMedia a little later on and it was a very
good answer to ArcView IMHO. It was the first GIS software that I know of that played nicely with other formats besides their own. GeoMedia’s native data format was a data warehouse that used MS Access, well before the ESRI Personal Geodatabase I believe.
Further back -1989 or 1990 I took a class in PC ArcInfo at UConn taught by Sandy Prisloe – I bet he could tell a good early GIS in CT GIS story. Always enjoyed running a simple command like a buffer
in PC ArcInfo, going to lunch while it ran, then coming back only to see ‘BAIL OUT AND CLEAN UP’ on the screen. We ran it mainly on 286s and 386s. Used something called KERMIT to talk to the digitizing table.
I have narrowly avoided phrases like ‘back in my day’ and ‘you young folks have it easy’….But this thread does make me feel pretty old!
Erik
Erik D. Snowden
IT/GIS Coordinator
Capitol Region Council of Governments
241 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06106
Main: 860.522.2217 Direct: 860-724-4217 F: 860.724.1274
From: Unmoderated discussion list for Connecticut GIS Users <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Meghan McGaffin
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 11:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CTGIS-L] For the old timers
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I’m curious, when did people in CT start getting hired for GIS positions outside of academia? Not the engineer or zoning officer who obtained GIS skills, but the earliest positions where the job role was just to know GIS software as a
desktop product? I was hired as a GIS intern in 2003 so I’m aging myself here but there were already people working in the field and there were consulting firms that existed to support them.
And to set a line in the sand, I’m going to use Wikipedia and say that “In 1986, Mapping Display and Analysis System (MIDAS), the first desktop GIS product
[15]
was released for the
DOS operating system. This was renamed in 1990 to MapInfo for Windows when it was ported to the Microsoft Windows platform. This began the process of moving GIS from the research department into the business environment." ArcView 1.0 was released in 1991
and shapefiles weren’t a thing until ArcView 2.
So, in CT, where did it begin?
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Meghan C. McGaffin GIS Coordinator O +1 203 344 7887 x5002 E
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