[rudasn]

...once someone else had thought about it and executed them in an intuive manner

[alenrozac]

...like Google Earth?

[mtmail]

Terravision existed prior (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/google-earth-sued-patent-infr...)

[SllX]

They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.

Turtles, turtles, turtles! All the way down.

[RF_Savage]

Which was Googles version of NASA WorldWind?

[SllX]

Keyhole EarthViewer predates WorldWind and is what became Google Earth after Google acquired Keyhole.

[RF_Savage]

Cool, did not know that. Apparently the idea was less novel than I thought.