Think what you want. You truly have no idea. No one mentioned this TerraVision in my presence. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people who came from SGI knew about it, but MTJ is the only one I am pretty sure (now) knew about it. He never mentioned it or their technology to me. Not once that I can recall.

His stated inspiration, iirc, was the “powers of 10” movie from years earlier. Other people were inspired by Snow Crash (1992). And some people remembered paper maps with transparent overlays. I’d been thinking about stuff like this since around 1992 anyway, more for VR versions.

From my perspective, our only real competition would be PC apps or web apps that browse the earth. This wasn’t a PC app. It only ran on high-end SGI machines. It wouldn’t have been relevant except if their IP overlapped, which it clearly didn’t.

Also, you seem to work in tech but aren’t aware that most employers nowadays tell their technologists not to go looking for comparable tech or patents. That’s especially because patent trolls will try to use that against the company. It’s better to come up with things internally, for better or worse.