An extract from the NPR Story on his death and his work has this quote:
"RAGUSEA: To think about all this at the same time, Tomlinson needed to build what he called a sandwich of the topographic and climate maps he had. At the time, this would have been done by printing the maps onto huge transparencies, stacking them on a light table and then looking down through them. But this was an aid project for a developing nation, they didn't have the budget for that.
TOMLINSON: And so I thought, if we could turn a map into a bunch of numbers, and the map on top into another bunch of numbers, and get the computer to compare those two bunches of numbers, then we've got something."
A method existed for making maps and overlays, it was manual, expensive and required a great deal of space to display the data. In the Army as late as 1991 this is the way we did overlays on maps to depict troop dispositions and movements.
Imagine all that has been done today with GPS and GIS to make our personal and professional lives easier. Not a week goes by that I'm not using a computer generated map for either professional or personal use.
My next blog post is going to be on the "Next Big Thing" in technology. Today we can guess what that might be, but I think there is another 27 year old Roger Tomlinson thinking of a new way to do something that is faster, cheaper and easier, enabling us to be more effective and efficient. What might that be?
