I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to another GIS pioneer who called Canada home - Dr. Ray Boyle. Ray is considered by many to be the father of modern digital cartography. In 1964, he invented the free "pencil" (cursor) digitizer. While a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, he put together a research lab for computer graphics and automated cartography that by the early '70s was providing truly innovative and creative approaches to interactive cartography, interactive digitizing, decluttering, automated symbology placement, and automated line following. All this on lowly PDP 8e mini-computers with a 32KB memory partition and all programmed in assembly. I had the good fortune to work with Ray and his team during the summer of 1974.
I have three interesting documents produced by the Graphics System and Design Group from the 1974 time period:
IMAGE: State of Development. IMAGE = Information for Management after Graphic Evaluation
DIGIT: Advanced Interactive Digitizing Program.
CART/8 Software Manual
I had to learn PDP assembly, which was not too hard. But Ray always liked to stress the limits of his staff. He gave me two projects: figure out how to do floating point arithmetic in PDP assembly and develop an application that given as input a set of irregularly spaced (x,y,z) points compute the contours. This kept me busy for weeks but I was able to figure out a reasonable approach by computing triangles - sound familiar? I completed the work during the summer. I names the software application "RCON" and wrote user documentation which I still have a copy of.
Ray and his teams' enthusiasm for cartography and GIS had a major impact on the formative years of our industry. Kudo's to another Canadian geo pioneer!