It's been 15 years since Google Maps was launched by Australian software engineer Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma, and Danish-born Rasmussen brothers Lars and Jens.
"What I remember that day mostly was that we had, what we considered, a pretty amazing launch. We served some 10 million maps on the very first day. A year later we were doing 60 million maps a day, and today it's over a billion people using Maps every day," recalls Gordon, who is also now a software engineer at Google.
The copy of the earliest sketch was drawn up during a period when the team of four were trying to sell their idea to Google's co-founder Larry Page, who later told them: "We like the web".
Conveniently, Asynchronous JavaScript XML was invented around the same time, which enabled the co-founders to move their idea onto the web.
"The surprising thing is that we wrapped all this up and put it into a web browser, which had never been done before. This made maps fast and fluid, and it was a completely different experience and no one had seen this before … The fluid experience was the most important thing about maps," Gordon said.
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