Looking Back Through Time
Someone pointed out this cool site, Historic Aerials. You plug in an address, just like you would with Google maps, and in addition to a fairly recent shot of your chosen address, you can also look at the same site through time. For example, I can look back at my current address through 10 other years dating back to 1946, a reminder that this area was once nothing but farm land for miles around.
But the big shock for me was to look at my childhood home. Yes, the homes themselves have been there since the 1930s, but I was stunned to find that the giant oak tree from my backyard was already enormous in the oldest photo from 1958. It also appears that the property that my high school was built upon was once a farm, improbably located just outside Philadelphia in the middle of a densely populated county.
If you want to get an idea of the staggering growth of Silicon Valley, do a search for 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, home of Apple Computer, and pan around to see the surrounding area. It wasn’t all that long ago that the entire Valley was an orchard. Now it seems that only iPods grow on trees.
