Two nerd guys in Berlin in the early 1990s, they developed together the idea of creating a kind of global work of art that would allow people to travel to any point in the world, simply by zooming into a location with a click of the mouse but computers in the early 1990s weren’t performant enough for their project.
Despite a chaotic process, the two partners managed to have their resounding success “Terra Vision” project at an international communications fair in Kyoto, Japan, in 1994. But during a trip to Silicon Valley, the source code for “Terra Vision” fell into the wrong hands and in 2005 Google, by then a tech giant, suddenly released Google Earth. The two developers from Germany felt that Google had stolen their idea — leading to a David vs. Goliath court case.