The very early use of digital computers, as part of code
breaking efforts during World War II, was to identify
geographical information – information about the
movement of military forces or the location of submarines.
Yet the use of computers was not to manipulate or handle
geographical information but to deal with deciphering
codes into meaningful messages. As computers started to
emerge as powerful general purpose machines, the field of
geography started to pay attention to them. Geography, with
its interest in the detail of places, population and patterns,
was attracted to the promise of manipulating ever-larger
datasets that came from censuses of populations, automatic
instruments and growing sets of observations. By the early
1960s, geographers promoted the use of computers for
geographical studies. Torsten Hägerstrand, [3] a famous