alt Hacker NewsThere is a Netflix miniseries about how two German underdog hackers built the first Google Earth precursor in 1994(!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code
(IIRC the premise was that the underdogs invented something like mipmaps, which I found hard to believe. The core tech was probably already invented by 3d shooters at that time)
It's not the same mipmapping that games use really, but dividing the map data into a quadtree with progressively finer resolutions.
It's more like turning mipmapping into a paging system.