Mapping is older than browsers
From a wonderful story of the April 2006 edition of The NewYorker:
In 1909, an engineer named J. W. Jones invented a device called the
Jones Live-Map, which connected to a car’s odometer. It consisted of a
glass-enclosed dial, on which you could place a disk representing a
particular trip. The disk had mileage numbers around the perimeter and
driving directions printed like spokes on the face. As you progressed
down the road, the disk would rotate, telling you where you were and
what to do. Live-Map No. 16, for example, guided the “motorist tourist”
from Columbus Circle to Waterbury, Connecticut (specifically, the Elton
Hotel), telling him, at various intervals, to “take right fork at flag
pole,” “pass under trolley arch,” or “caution for dangerous curves.”
In the early '90s, Xerox Parc ...
(...) launched its first online mapping application a year before Netscape produced its first browser. The first consumer online mapping services started 1996, fuelled by the former gas station map division. 10 years later, MapQuest serves more than 1 billion maps per month. Eventually ESRI, Yahoo, Google, and a multitude of others jumped into the online map game. And Microsoft’s Expedia that initially started as a CD-ROM product in 1998, morphed into MSN Maps and then into it’s latest incarnation Live Maps.
Efficient routing between two points became viable only in the last years, opening opportunities to an emerging new industry.
All of a sudden anyone with a computer could access maps of every region and street almost anywhere – by simply entering the known parts of an address.
Today it is realistic to assume that almost no one will go anywhere without using an online map service first.
