I worked for many years as a hydrographic surveyor doing maritime research, deep ocean floor mapping and also reef and coastal seabed mapping. My work spanned the era from fully manual compilation of data through to the use of (at that time) powerful computers. As early as 1994 we had terrabyte array hard drives and gigabytes of RAM in use and were modelling complex 3D terrains. My laptop now is no doubt more capable than the large systems we had in place back then...  I know exactly how challenging it was to be at the limitations of technology at that time whilst tring to present vast amounts of completx data in a way that could be easily interpreted by anybody. The resultant data also made its way onto nautical charts used by mariners. 

Thanks for the insight into your work Conniekat8 :-)