Enigma Software [Previous ¦ Next]
I joined a small startup company who took a hashing algorithm, originally written for the Texas School Board library program to catalogue books in that very large state. We stored on CD-ROMs and indexed for ultra-fast retrieval the entire well data set for the province of Alberta, Canada. It then added production and the same for the rest of western Canada on two more CDs, which were updated monthly and sold to oil companies by subscription - CDs were so uncommon then, that CD readers had to be leased to subscribers!
The data came from a local regulatory quirk: after two years operators had to make public all well and production data, which the Provincial government became maintained but did not distribute; a cottage industry developed in Calgary around that, and resulted in a comprehensive data set in the third largest petroleum province in the world. 150,000 wells were however not easy to store and retrieve, except by major oil companies with significant databasing facilities.
The CD-ROMs were a hit for small-to-medium companies, and they rapidly demanded a graphical user interface to the text searching front-end. I found a group of consultants called Enigma (some of whom were from Texaco and Chevron - see Geo/SQL), would have gladly added a GUI had the owner agreed to it - again, mapping and GIS were not yet in vogue! I went on to another data vendor, who also created later a mapping front-end to its data-delivery system (see Munro).
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