As a master’s student at the University of South Carolina Department of Geography and Remote Sensing Specialist at SC DNR, I interviewed with ER Mapper while at ASPRS in Baltimore Maryland the week of March 24, 1991 and was invited to interview with ER Mapper in San Diego in mid-May 1991. During my visit in May, I met with David Hayward and Stuart Nixon. David gave me an extensive demo of the software. I was very impressed with the software.
I was somewhat concerned when Stuart stated ER Mapper would be larger than ERDAS within 2-years. ER Mapper hired Jill Andrews rather than me. I accepted a technical sales position at ERDAS and started at ERDAS on July 15, 1991. On May 21 2007, ERDAS announced the purchase of ER Mapper Ltd.
19 Feb 1990, Australian Beta Release (Beta 1)
- Introduces Dynamic Algorithm Compiler (on-the-fly image processing) to Remote Sensing community
- Sun Workstation only
1 May 1990, ER Mapper 1.0 released
9 Jul 1990, ER Mapper 1.1 released
21 Sep 1990, ER Mapper 1.2 released
10 Jan 1991, ER Mapper 2.0 released
- Expanded marketing efforts into Europe and Americas
20 May 1992, ER Mapper 3.1 released
26 Aug 1992, ER Mapper 3.2 released
15 Jan 1993, ER Mapper 4.0 released
- Expanded capabilities to support forestry, land use and water resources
- As reported by GISL Limited, the first PC ER Mapper license was purchased in Europe by GISL Limited, but Windows was not supported until a later version.
4 Feb 1994, ER Mapper 4.1a released
18 Oct 1994, ER Mapper 4.2 released
30 Jun 1995, ER Mapper 5.0 released
- Support Sun, SGI, DEC, HP And Windows NT
- 3D Capability introduced
- Microsoft Windows 95 support added
27 Feb 1997, ER Mapper 5.5 released
- HP-UX and DEC Alpha support dropped, Sun Solaris, SGI Irix, and Windows 95/NT remain
- Improved 3D capability
- Oil and Gas Wizards to exchange data with Charisma, GeoQuest and SeisWorks
- Customers include Landmark, Schlumberger, BP Exploration, Mobile, Texaco and Shell
- Introduce real-time roaming and zooming
- Introduce ortho-rectification of images
- Introduce image compression wizard
- Introduce mosaic wizard
- Introduce image gridding wizard (ascii points and vector datasets)
- Introduce contour to screen wizard, file save as to create files
- Radar processing bundled into core package
- ECW Compression Enhancement Pack added (ECW v2.0)
4 January 2000, ER Mapper 6.1 released
- Image Web Plug-in
- Improved licensing
- Improved ECW performance(70% faster)
- Add GeoTIFF support
- Wizard to support MapInfo .tab files
- Landsat Web publishing wizard
- Introduce Mineral Exploration wizard
- IKONOS, IRS, Landsat and Spot data supported
- Automated tools for orientation, measurement, and error correction
- Maintenance release
- HDF Translator
- Simplified workflows
- Windows XP Support
- Enhanced Compression Tools
- Shapefile I/O
- Spectral Angle Mapper Formula
- Aster Processing Wizard
- Maintenance release
- Reprojection-on-the-fly introduced
- Compression to ECW of Multi-TB images (5TB tested)
- Reproject GeoTIFF and ECW
- Add floating network license support
- Maintenance release
- JPEG2000 support added (Lossly, lossless, NITF), created 1-TB JPEG2000 Landsat mosaic
- Added 13 new Batch Processing Wizards
- Added new projections
- Maintenance release
- Maintenance release
- Add support for ERDAS IMAGINE .img format
- GeoTIFF enhancements (read and write TIFFs up to 2GB, JPEG format TIFF)
- JPEG2000 Alpha Channel Support
2 Sept 2008, ER Mapper 7.1 SP1 released
- Maintenance release
- Significant maintenance effort
- Expanded projection support
- Native support to read IMG
- Clip Region Wizard, included rotated regions
- Add MrSID, RPF (CIB and CADRG) and PCIDSK support
- Joint Licensing with IMAGINE Professional
- License borrowing
- Maintenance release
- Maintenance release
- Support for Windows x32 and x64 for Windows XP, Vista, and 7
- Improved raster file format handling
- ASTER Processing Wizard
- Expanded projection support (use ERDAS projection engine)
- Improved Image Handling and Processing
- Improved handling and visualization of 16-bit and floating point data
- Transparency Masks in ECW and JPEG2000 images
- Implement 'Large Memory Aware' to better utilize RAM
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
- Maintenance release
- Expand 'Large Memory Aware' use
- Handle calibrated IMG files with affine map model
- Write IMG files
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
- Maintenance release
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
- Maintenance release
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
- Maintenance release
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
- Maintenance release
- Upgraded to latest ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK
4 comments:
I think that two important milestones should be added to the story:
Start of Microsoft windows support (version 5.1) and end of UNIX support (should be 6.0, but I am not sure).
The 4.0 European Licence reported as a PC licence can not be a PC one. 4.0 was supported only on Solaris and IRIX.
Thanks Sergio. Do you know when IRIX was introduced and were there any other UNIX verions as well as what version of Windows NT was originally supported?
I have no data about the start of Support of various UNIX version.
I have opened my secret archives: I found that end of support for HP-UX and DEC was announced in January 97. As result 5.5 was only for Solaris and IRIX (as well as Windows).
I was checking on ERMapper current status after 12 years since I stopped working with the software. I started using it in 1994 and was happy to use for 12 years until 2004. Still I can see some of the advantages it offered over other software and like to see again how it is doing now. Thanks Paul for the blog
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