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the students understood the relationships) to clearly understand how the final phase
of the map production process (offset printing) may affect the beginning phase of the
map production (creating a map symbology). However it is not obligatory to be an
expert of the whole reproduction phase, but to understand its importance is really
necessary if we want to run our business efficiently.
In my university the independent Department of Cartography was founded in
1953 and in 1955 we started the first cartography course. In practice it was not an
independent cartography course, but it was a specialization after the second year
based on the geography and geology courses (we may call it is a pre-Bologna
system: 2 + 3 years). We had a series of lessons with a title Map technologies and
the students had to understand the whole technical process of map producing:
map drawing or scribing, all kind of technical works (photography, screening),
proofing, offset printing (including binding, folding). These were not just theoreti-
cal lessons, but students had to practice all different areas: we had all technical
devices (special camera for reproduction, frames for contact copies, special instru-
ments for screenings, proofing devices, offset printing machine; folding and bind-
ing were connected to topic and newspaper publishing so we didn't have such kind
of machines so we visited printing houses to present these processes to our
students). Of course we also had similar practical lessons in the drawing part (ink
drawing and scribing, etc.). A student who has made the whole process himself/herself
was able to understand the potential errors so they were able to manage the production
line when they started to work in mapping company or state cartography.
3.5 The First Steps of Digital Cartography
The
Geographic Information System
was parallelly developed in America,
Australia and Europe. The extraction of simple measures largely drove the devel-
opment of the first real GIS, the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS)
in the mid-1960s. CGIS was planned and developed as a measuring tool (mostly to
help the precise measures of areas), a producer of tabular information. At that time
the system couldn't be a mapping tool, because the most important input and
devices were not yet developed. At that time computer systems were very unique
and very expensive and mainly used only for research or (secret) military
purposes.
A second step of innovation occurred on the late 1960s in the US Bureau of the
Census, in planning the tools needed to conducts the 1970 Census. The DIME
program (Dual Independent Map Encoding) created digital records of all US streets,
to support automatic referencing and calculation of census records (the US Census
was always very innovative, Hollerith built machines under contract for the Census
Office, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census data using special punched
cards). The similarity of
this technology to that of CGIS was recognized
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