Today's Globe&Mail reports on how Roger Tomlinson of Canada birthed geographic information systems (GIS). The idea rose from the thought that computers might be able to derive map data more cheaply than doing the work by hand:
The project estimate for doing the job manually was about $8-million; Dr. Tomlinson thought it could be done for $3-million on a computer. "We eventually did it for about $10-million, but that's the way programming goes," he chuckled.
More than a year ago I posed the question of CAD computing in the cloud to Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. If he didn't actually say "never" he did make it clear it wasn't happening for a long long time. But I'm not so sure Dassault Systemes agrees -- look at their 3D Via. Today it is visualization, but I'm sure they have bigger intentions.
Posted by: Randall Newton | Dec 17, 2007 at 11:42 AM