ABSTRACT
The maps published by Bullard, Everett, and Smith were made by first computing the intersection points of selected parallels and meridians on the plate after rotation, and printing a list of these numbers. In 1965 at Cambridge University, Teddy Bullard, with Jim Everett and Alan Smith, had already fit the continental shelves around the Atlantic, using internally rigid bodies, moving the continents about their Euler poles of rotation, in a purely geometrical manner. In the fall of 1967 the author was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics , which is part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the University of California at San Diego. It may be interesting to look at how computers had been used in other parts of the early development of plate tectonics. Nonetheless, plate tectonics succeeded in providing the framework for making sense of the large-scale processes governing the development of the earth's crust.
