Keyhole EarthViewer

» see keyhole.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

earthviewer's years line up almost exactly with my dial-up years, which is the whole reason i never ran it. a program whose entire premise is streaming photographs of the planet down to your machine assumes a connection i did not have in 2001. i met this software four years later under its second name, on a turkish line that made it crawl, and i still remember watching gray tiles resolve one square at a time while the globe waited.

it came out of a games company. intrinsic graphics had built 3d middleware and, as a demo, a spinning earth you could zoom into, the software version of the powers of ten film. that demo was interesting enough to become its own company in 1999. keyhole inc took nvidia and sony money in early 2001 and shipped earthviewer 1.0 that june, sold on a cd with a yearly subscription behind it. personal use ran about thirty dollars a year, and the professional tiers went into the hundreds.

the customers were people who needed to look at land for a living, in real estate and urban planning. the other customer was the government. the national imagery and mapping agency funded keyhole through in-q-tel, the cia's venture fund, which is where the company name comes from as well, a nod to the kh reconnaissance satellites. in march 2003 cnn put earthviewer on the air during the invasion of iraq and flew the audience over the terrain as reporters described it. that was the moment ordinary people saw what the thing did.

google bought keyhole in october 2004. on 28 june 2005 it released google earth as a free download for anyone with a windows machine, and earthviewer stopped being a product name. the professional edition survived as google earth pro and the imagery pipeline underneath went into google maps. john hanke stayed at google long enough to start the internal lab that later became niantic.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

the trick people missed was that the globe was never on your disk. earthviewer held almost nothing locally. it worked out which tiles your viewpoint needed at which resolution and asked a server for exactly those, drawing them as they arrived. that is why the picture sharpened underneath you as you descended. that is ordinary now because every map on every phone does it. in 2001 it was a genuinely strange idea, and it came from people who had spent years making game engines decide what not to draw.

~ the day it changed names ~

a subscription product with a modest professional user base became a free download that reached tens of millions of machines inside a year, and the difference was the price tag rather than the code. the first thing everyone did was type their own address, and the second was look at their roof. within weeks governments were complaining about their airbases being visible, which had also been true the day before, at thirty dollars a year, when nobody was looking.

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