Terravision existed prior (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/google-earth-sued-patent-infr...)

They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.

Turtles, turtles, turtles! All the way down.

Which was Googles version of NASA WorldWind?

Keyhole EarthViewer predates WorldWind and is what became Google Earth after Google acquired Keyhole.

Cool, did not know that. Apparently the idea was less novel than I thought.