- Juri and Carsten recount meeting in Berlin and securing Deutsche Telekom's investment in their completely unproven idea - with a hard one-year deadline.
- The English language term "visionary programmer" is made up of two words. In the digital era, there are many famous collaborators where one is visionary, and the other is a programmer. That's how "Apple" came to life. This story also has a duo, Carsten Schlüter, and Juri Müller, whose invention changed the way we look at the world.
The Billion Dollar Code begins six weeks before an upcoming trial of Art+Com vs Google. An American lawyer, Lea Hausiwth, prepares plaintiffs Carsten and Juri for a patent infringement case. Carsten and Juri begin their story of how their dream project 'Terravision' was created.
The narrative captures the events of the early 90s. In 1993, Carsten Schlüter is an art student at Berlin University and holds a passionate interest in visual art. Through his art, he attempts to view the planet Earth in an alternate and artificial reality. Though Carsten is a visionary, he lacks programming skills. Due to that, his virtual program constantly freezes and crashes. Fortunately, Carsten meets a computer nerd, Juri Müller, in a nightclub. Juri rewrites the algorithm for Carsten's program to improve its real-time performance.
Carsten's virtual reality Earth View program captivates Müller's interest, and together the two innovators decide to create a full-fledged mapping software. Juri was a member of the chaos computer club, who were notorious for their hacks. Juri says that to realize Carsten's vision require the computer to store millions of photographs and to access them in real time. This technology did not exist yet and the computers of that age could only store up to a thousand images at a time. They need an Onyx reality engine, which was used to create the Terminator movie, and it costs 1 million Deutsche Marks.
A Deutsche Telecom company invests in their start-up. When the Berlin wall came down, state owned companies were required to invest in domestic start-ups and future technologies. The giant had called all entrepreneurs to present their ideas. They initially reject Carsten's idea as they did not believe that the project could be completed in their lifetime. But Carsten's passionate plea to support innovation, swayed their opinion. The company provides them with funds to develop and present the software at an upcoming ITU conference in Kyoto. With a deadline over their head, Juri and Carsten create a salient team to finish a bug-free program. The team had designers and computer programmers from Juri's club. They also purchase the Onyx reality engine to build their code.
They have 4 teams. One working on the maps and digitizing them. One working on a database to store them. One to create the interface, and lastly Juri working on the algorithm to access and display the maps in real time. They could not buy the maps legally, so they hacked NASA and downloaded all the satellite images. After a few months, things are looking promising, but Juri is not able to make the algorithm work. Their computer simply does not have enough working memory to store the entire data. There were only 2 months left for Kyoto. Juri breaks down under stress and is admitted to the hospital. Carsten shows faith in Juri and restores his confidence. They are in this together.
Juri gets the inspiration from a tree. He figures out how to optimize the loading of the images as the user closed in on Earth to a specific location. He creates an inverted tree, with each picture leading to loading 4 more pictures with the right resolution. He creates a floating coordinate system. This was the first algorithm that allowed a user to zoom into an infinitely large data-set in real time.
Klaus and Helga from Deutsche Telecom come in for an inspection of the program one month before Kyoto and the program is not ready yet. So, Carsten fools them by loading some destinations in the software and recording them. He simply creates an illusion that Klaus and Helga are picking those destinations voluntarily, but they were researched on their personal histories. Klaus goes back satisfied.
The whole team travels to Kyoto, but the program is not ready yet. Juri is even working on the plane. Juri manages to complete the algorithm 30 seconds before the panel walks in.
They unveil their magnum opus in Kyoto and enchant each and every person present at the event. However, their God Machine is soon stolen from them, and they can't do anything to tell the world that they are its inventors. Google released Google Earth in 2005. Terra Vision and Google Earth are identical.
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