Emphatic agreement. I was doing CAD & GIS in the 80s. We certainly foresaw this stuff. Even so, I'm just gobsmacked by the number and quality of all the map & GIS systems.
Was ESRI the industry titan back then too? These days there are a bunch of open-source/open-data initiatives and they're making it MUCH more pleasant to do GIS, thankfully.
To my knowledge, yes. But noob me was only aware of PC-based software. There were probably more options on beefier hardware (workstations, minis, mainframes).
> making it MUCH more pleasant to do GIS
Totally. Back then, everything was all but bespoke. Almost zero interop. It was a huge hassle. Now GIS can be just a feature set on top of a proper database. Something like PostGIS was inconceivable to me back then.