ABSTRACT
Geographical Information Systems or GIS1 have a history that goes back in one form or other to the 1950s, but their expansion on a large scale was a phenomenon of the later 1980s and early 1990s. GIS developed the power to answer important geographical questions, questions which are not asked exclusively by geographers, and GIS came into use across a wide range of different disciplines. By the early 1990s it was no longer a technology that supported existing fields, but had become a discipline in its own right. It now supports a large literature including monumental works like the two-volume Geographical Information Systems edited by Maguire et al. (1991) and its own journals like the UK-based Mapping Awareness. Some academic geographers who did not know how GIS were organised and implemented seemed to regard them as almost magically powerful tools. The rise of the Internet may have provided a new focus for this worship of technology, but GIS have quietly gone on entrenching themselves more firmly as the 1990s have progressed.
