The web's favorite map started life in 1967 as a map shop inside a Chicago printing company. R.R. Donnelley & Sons made road atlases and travel guides from a plant in Pennsylvania farm country. By the time MapQuest filed to go public in 1999, that same team had put its maps online. Millions of drivers typed in two addresses, hit print, and set off with a sheet of turn-by-turn directions on the passenger seat.

From Atlas to Address Bar

The mapping unit spent decades drawing maps for atlases and travel guides. Donnelley spun it out in 1994 as GeoSystems Global, and in 1996 the company opened MapQuest, a free website for maps and directions. The bet was simple. Give the maps away and sell the traffic to advertisers. Then license the same engine to other websites and businesses that needed maps of their own. The company kept its headquarters in Mountville, Pennsylvania.

A Billion-Dollar Map

MapQuest priced its offering at $15 a share in May 1999, above the $10 to $12 range it first set. The money was useful, but the sale came fast. In December 1999, AOL agreed to buy MapQuest for about $1.1 billion in stock, and the deal closed in 2000. Phones with GPS and Google Maps later took most of its audience. In 2019 the site changed owners again when Verizon sold MapQuest to System1.

Cover: The Map, Mary Cassatt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a woman studying a map (directions).