Another term for theses is "raster pyramids". Here's an example from 1993: https://www.usgs.gov/publications/pyramid-system-multiscale-...
I don't understand. There were loads of online maps before Google maps and they all used tiles. How else would you do it? What Google added was smooth panning between tiles, pretty much as soon as native browser technology was up to the job. If they hadn't someone else would have.
paper forms of this have existed in land surveying ... for a long time. Mind, they didn't follow quadtree, just "useful at the time" scaling. From my vague memories of working with this and data in 1992-1993, I think older references often involved polyconic map coordinates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangular_polyconic_projecti...
Some of these sure look a lot like mipmaps.
i thought there would be a line or two about Terravision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terravision_(computer_program)
I worked on supercomputer algorithms to render planetary terrain data (image plus digital elevation) using tiling back in the early 90’s. I’m not sure where my co-worker got the idea, but it seemed like an obvious thing to do.
I worked on a system at Martin Marietta in the late 80's and early 90's where we created tiled maps for use by the US Army. We had a large scanner we'd use to scan their maps, then we'd georectify the scan and slice the result up into tiles of 128x128 pixels which would be compressed before storing to a whopping 360 Meg hard drive. I participated in a number of Army field exercises in the US and Europe where we'd show the digital maps and graphic overlays off to troops who were using paper maps with little paper icons they move around to reflect the current situation. Our capability never went anywhere because Management wasn't really into map-maping and the Defense Mapping Agency started doing it themselves, distributing their maps on CD.