By the late 1970s two public domain GIS systems (MOSS and GRASS GIS) were in development, and by the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later Intergraph) along with Bentley Systems Incorporated for the CAD platform, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), MapInfo Corporation and ERDAS (Earth Resource Data Analysis System) emerged as commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining the first generation approach to separation of spatial and attribute information with a second generation approach to organizing attribute data into database structures.
Leta 1964 Howard T. Fisher ustanovi Laboratorij za računalniško grafiko in prostorske analize na "Harvard Graduate School of Design" (LCGSA 1965-1991), kjer so bili razviti številni pomembni teoretični koncepti prostorske obdelave podatkov, ki so bili do leta 1970 razdeljeni na programsko kodo in sisteme, kot so SYMAP, GRID in ODYSSEY, in so služili kot vir za nadaljnji komercialni razvoj na univerzah, v raziskovalnih centrih in družbah po vsem svetu.