One of the interesting historical aspects of MOSS are the number of GIS technology advancements deployed with the1978 operational deployment of the software. Many of these GIS industry "firsts" were enhanced and used in the design and development of GenaMap.
In 1977/78, the vast majority of GIS software applications were executed in batch mode. MOSS was one of the first interactive vector based GIS applications. Some other interesting technological advancements were:
1. Metadata. Every map in the MOSS database had what was called a "map header". This map header contained a considerable amount of metadata. The metadata included date of creation, a description, projection (coordinate reference system) parameters, who created the map, number of features, and so forth. Metadata could be browsed, printed, and in later versions of the software used as the basis of queries. The metadata concept was considerable expanded when DeltaMap/GenaMap was developed.
2. Spatial Views, known as Active IDs back in 1978. Unlike any other GIS at the time, a MOSS user could issue a "select" command and MOSS would create an Active ID table (session) that could be saved and used the next time a user logged into MOSS. Essentially, MOSS allowed the user to save state information. As an example, the user starts a new MOSS session and issues a command "Select streams length 0 10" which states select all linear features in a map called "streams" that have a length of between 0 and 10 (in whatever the current units are). The results of this select operation would generate active ID number 1. This was not a copy of the map. MOSS tracked the feature IDs of all the map features related to each "select" operation. MOSS commands could then reference these active IDs, allowing for reuse of any selected features without issuing a new select command. For example, the command "PLOT 1" would plot all the features associated with active ID 1. The concept is very similar to spatial views. The concept of views was considerably expanded and extended for DeltaMap/GenaMap.
3. Integrated Vector/Raster database and processing: While relatively primitive by today's standards, MOSS did support the storage and processing (limited) of gridded data, such as Digital Elevation Models and gridded vector data sets. From a user interface perspective, however, MOSS allowed the user to express that same commands to process and visualize both vector and raster data. The software would process the command and utilize the proper algorithms based on the data type.
The MOSS commands SELECT, LIST (metadata), PLOT, SHADE, QUERY all worked with both vector and raster data. For example:
SHADE (Landuse.vec, USGSDem) will shade both the vector map and the Dem using their current styling information.