A very long time ago (~1996-1997) I worked for a company in Sunnyvale called Vicinity which made mapblast, a website now so lost to time that google will assume you are typoing mapquest if you search for it. The company was eventually sold (well after I had left) to Microsoft and became part of MSN I believe.
The tech behind mapblast also powered the first version of Yahoo Maps, which was a pretty big deal at the time (this was before Google Maps eventually came in and overshadowed everyone else in that market).
I was in my early 20s and working for one of my first tech startups at the time but Vicinity was primarily made up of graybeards who had previously worked for Etak (who was the primary map data provider for the online mapping system we made, so they had a lot of experience with it) and many of those people were also ex-Atari prior to Etak.
The tech behind mapblast also powered the first version of Yahoo Maps, which was a pretty big deal at the time (this was before Google Maps eventually came in and overshadowed everyone else in that market).
I was in my early 20s and working for one of my first tech startups at the time but Vicinity was primarily made up of graybeards who had previously worked for Etak (who was the primary map data provider for the online mapping system we made, so they had a lot of experience with it) and many of those people were also ex-Atari prior to Etak.