How did computers go from a novelty to a necessity in the cartographic process—and how did mapmakers manage to compress the chaos of the world into a computer screen?
In 1959, before the so-called “computer revolution” of the 1960s, the geographer Waldo Tobler identified three likely possibilities for automation in cartography: the map as data storage, the map as a computer input, and the map as a processing output. Tobler’s early guesses turned out to be correct, but not everyone agreed at the time. Even though computers were becoming more widely available for research and commercial purposes, there was little agreement about whether computers would significantly change how people made maps. Some practitioners thought computer mapping was just a fad. These machines, they suspected, could never replace the human hand. Others simply balked at the prohibitive expense at a time when computer calculations might take tens of thousands of dollars to process and print. During this era of hybrid mapmaking techniques, experimentation was the name of the game—and year by year, as the methods got cheaper and more accessible, more people wanted to play.