In the 1984 time frame, Autometric entered into a contract with the Engineering Topographic Laboratory (ETL) to work on a project called the Terrain Analysis Workstation (TAWS). TAWS, the Terrain Analysis Workstation, was developed with the U.S. Army Engineering Topological Laboratory (ETL). TAWS, a pioneering effort in using the DMA Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED), provided capabilities for generating perspective views of terrain, visibility plots, and mobility information.
A key component of TAWS was a GIS. The US ETL decided that the AMS/MOSS GIS software should be posted to the TAWS environment. A key aspect of this work was the hardware platform: HP work stations running the UNIX operating systems. This work may be the first known example of a full GIS capability being implemented and deployed in the UNIX environment.