History of development

History of development

The early 20th century saw the development of by which maps were separated into layers. Computer hardware development spurred by research led to general-purpose computer "mapping" applications by the early 1960s.

CGIS was the world's first such system and an improvement over "mapping" applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement, and scanning. It supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as "arcs" having a true embedded topology, and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the "father of GIS," particularly for his use of overlays in promoting the spatial analysis of convergent geographic data CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada. It was developed as a mainframe based system in support of federal and provincial resource planning and management. Its strength was continent-wide analysis of complex. The CGIS was never available in a commercial form.

By the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later Environmental Systems Research Institute ((Computer Aided Resource Information System) and ERDAS emerged as commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining the first generation approach to separation of spatial and attribute information with a second generation approach to organizing attribute data into database structures. In parallel, the development of two public domain systems began in the late 1970s and early 1980sthe Map Overlay and Statistical System project started in 1977 in Fort Collins, Colorado under the auspices of the Western Energy and Land Use Team (WELUT) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. was begun in 1982 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering Research Laboratory (USA-CERL) in Champaign, Illinois, a branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to meet the need of the U.S. military for software for land management and environmental planning. The later 1980s and 1990s industry growth were spurred on by the growing use of GIS on workstations and the personal computer.