re: It's absolutely amazing how far these folks have come!
GIS has come a long way, but it's not new. I was doing GIS in the late 70s (although it wasn't called that yet, it was "computer graphics"): big mainframes, dumb terminals, batch processing, Fortran source code, 9" plot tapes and flatbed plotters the size of snooker tables. Real programmers did it on the bare metal.