Depending upon how we look at it, Computer Cartography can be considered now to be twenty years old (the first contour map was produced about twenty years ago), or a dozen years (the first major project in Computer Cartography, the Canadian Geographical Information System was started in 1963). This is not to say that we started out from scratch twelve or twenty years ago. On the contrary, we had all the tools and all the power from different disciplines, including Computer Science, Geography, Cartography and the Survey Sciences. If we assume that every discipline has some milestones in its development, it has to be said that in Computer Cartography these milestones did not happen or happened virtually unnoticed by the discipline.
A Literature Review on Computer Cartography
