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History of koordinaten.de
Mr. Robert Heret, founder and operator of the Robert Heret Informatik Service, that runs koordinaten.de, long ago (during his studies of informatics) wanted to calculate the distances between airports. He therefore established a list of airports and their distance to the Frankfurt airport, in which vicinity he lives.
After adding a couple of airports, he found it very time consuming to gather these information's (e.g. a list of 1000 airports and their respective distance to one another reached up to 1,000,000 datasets) and therefore started to tackle the problem in its base - the calculation of distances.
To achieve this, he needed a criteria, that allowed him to identify the location of an airport uniquely and use it for his calculations - thus coordinates were gathered.
In 1998, when he fist gathered this information, it was not as easily obtainable and useable as today with navigation systems in cars, routing devices in the internet or on computers.
In February 1999 he established the first real database of coordinates, which he included in a software, called "koordinaten" and soled as a Shareware. In 2000 the Shareware allowed to export the data into other applications.
The last version of this software was introduced in 1999 and was called koordinaten 3.5 and was soled until 2002.
Because the software or better its license had been cracked by software-crackers (those people who make you use Software without paying for it - a medal with two sides, really) and the inability to secure the data, it was decided to stop the distribution and refinement of the software and in 2000 koordinaten.de was introduced.
All old and new functions plus a better and more sophisticated database were introduced and sold in the way we still do today. To avoid the new challenges, such as scripts trying to archive all of the data or even real people, trying to calculate all distances, the site was built to show the mere possibilities of the data and the functions.
The first domains used were http://germany.net/koordinaten or http://koordinaten.home.pages.de.
The domain "koordinaten.de" was established in late 2000.
In 2005 we relaunched the site, aiming for a more up-to-date look and feel and at the same time preparing the site for a multi-language audience, for which this English version is the first step. Spanish and French versions will follow in this year.
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