I’ve read a very cool article about the history of Street View in the website of the Computer History Museum. In 1978, our colleagues of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT (later the MIT Media Lab), led by Nicholas Negroponte, came up with the Aspen Interactive Movie Map, a project that pioneered basically all of the features of street view today, including navigation buttons, integration with flat maps and aerial photography,  touchscreen control, and 3D models of buildings.

You can find more info, videos and pictures in the article of the Computer History Museum and in this article in the MIT Technology Review.

(Picture from the website of the Computer History Museum: Using the Aspen Movie map from an experimental rig)