"The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what
you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no
guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel."
Expanding on the subject of prior art for a navigable 3D globe: A family member used to work in the weather graphics department at a TV station in the late 90s or very early 2000s. During a tour I got to try something very similar to Google Earth that ran on IRIX (but without access to terrain imagery IIRC, just weather imagery) that they used for doing weather animations.
SGI had some cool hardware. This station also had an O2 and an Onyx, sharing an 18GB SCSI external drive over NFS, if I am remembering their explanation right (these memories are older than I was when I formed them). The software rep happened to be on site that day, and mentioned Inventor files, I think.
I was kinda sad when I heard they replaced everything with Windows NT.
Your memory is correct. This was the default setup for WSI’s TV weather system. Early systems used Indy/Indigo^2 boxes instead of the O2.
In later revisions, they had terrain mapping but it required 8 gigabytes of ram for the texture mapper, at a cost of $60,000.
That was all ripped out and replaced with Dell hardware running Red Hat in 2005. The trusty O2 ran crawls and alerts, spooled WSI’s AWIPS data feed into iNews (how TV news produces the show) for another decade. It could still be there, running.
