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Comment by softgrow | Hacker News Reader

Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages France) had street view in March 2002. I used it to work out how to get from the train station to accommodation on arrival. Two problems though on arrival train partial strike so travel agent arranged a car and Page Jaunes assumed a side exit of Les Halles railway station was the main one. Still earlier than 2005, and to quote archive.org "2 200 000 photos de villes" https://web.archive.org/web/20020326031423/http://photos.pag... and voila! https://web.archive.org/web/20061130215611/http://photos.pag... and https://web.archive.org/web/20051012124517/http://photos.pag...

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I remember this, but it was very different from Street View; it was made by sending students on rollerblades to snap pictures of buildings; it only concerned itself with big cities (mostly Paris at first if I remember correctly); and on the client side there was no stitching of any sort: you could just see a picture, then another, then another.

The idea was there, but the execution was poor; execution is what matters.

So you could actually walk down the street like SV? In 2002? Wow.

I went through old emails and I was using it in early February 2003, so not quite 2002. I showed it to a number of people and some said, well, it's interesting but will never take off, others thought it looked really useful. One comment "Hey there is a boulangerie (bakery) right where you are staying!", this is cool. (Pity the bakery went on holidays just as we arrived). As others pointed out it was buildings only, so I knew what to expect to my left and right, but had, for example no idea how wide Boulevard de Sebastapol was but I did know there is a KFC on the left (still is looking at Streetview now). One good thing about the pagesjaunes solution was that they walked rather than drove the streets. As my journey was along Rue Berger (from Chatelet les Halles heading towards the Pompidou Centre), the 2014 Streetview experience is pretty hit and miss.

Still I thought it was cool, and even took a bunch of photos (Digital, brand new Sony Mavica writing to CDRs in the camera) of the walk from the station, duplicating what I saw before setting out.

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