History
Though it was online as early as December 1997, the site was formally unveiled June 24, 1998 as part of an 18-month agreement between Microsoft, Compaq, and Aerial Images of Raleigh, North Carolina. It was created as a demonstration system to advertise the scalability of Microsoft's Windows NT Server and SQL Server, and used images from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Sovinformsputnik (the Russian Federal Space Agency).
TerraServer was the brainchild of the Turing Award winning researcher on database systems, Jim Gray. Before his death, Gray continued this work, developing Microsoft Virtual Earth and began a similar project that would become the Worldwide Telescope.
In January 2000, Microsoft and Aerial Images, now TerraServer.com, Inc., split their operations, creating two parallel TerraServer websites. The dualism caused confusion among web surfers until the Microsoft name change in 2010. TerraServer.com, Inc., which owns the trademark TERRASERVER, filed a lawsuit in 2008 in North Carolina federal court, seeking monetary damages and asking that Microsoft be stopped from using the TerraServer trademark.
The TerraServer name was a play on words, with 'Terra' referring to the 'earth' or 'land' and also to the terabytes of images stored on the site.
Read more about this topic: Microsoft Research Maps
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)