[sbrorson]

I worked at the Arch Mach at MIT for a very short period in the very early 1980s. The Arch Mach was the predecessor to the MIT Media Lab. I made absolutely no impact there, but I do recall one of the successes of the lab was a kind of prototype of today's Google Maps Street View, where you could drive around Aspen, Colo on the computer and look at image taken from a car driving around the town. You could choose to drive forward, then turn left or right at an intersection as desired. You could thereby explore the entire town via the computer. It was regarded as extremely cool at the time. It's clearly the inspiration to today's Google Street View. Although I didn't work on it myself, I was able to play with it.

The images were stored on a laserdisk, and as you drove down the street the laserdisk player would pull the appropriate images off the disk and show them to you on the computer monitor. The images were stored on laserdisk because they were large files and at the time the only way you could store a lot of such large files was on a laserdisk since it was designed to hold video. For the 1981-1982 time-frame the Aspen exploration system was very forward-looking, but I do recall a delay between the time when you'd hit the button to move ahead, and the image would appear on the monitor. The delay had to do with first seeking, then reading the image off the disk.

I just looked around the web, and found this link describing the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map

I see a bunch of names I recognize in the Wikipedia article, so here's a shoutout to all the folks I worked with while I was an insignificant undergrad.