14 ms·

A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

982 points by MBCook 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago
Did that interface inspire the PipBoy in the first Fallout game 12 years later?
- treve 3y ago
  It's possible, but it's also similar to other vector graphics from the time.
- ghostly_s 3y ago
  There were CRT based in-car record keeping systems used in police cars for a long time before laptops replaced them which had a very similar form factor.
- ramigb 3y ago
  I came here to say the same thing but I searched if someone else mentioned it. so thank you :D insane nostalgia
myself248 3y ago
I have a fantasy that someone reverse-engineers the tape data format and is able to render new maps to it. For the 2 etak systems still operational out there...
skykooler 3y ago
What happened to the original units? Are there any left?
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Apparently Computer History Museum has one, catalog number 102766595, "Gift of Stan Honey". Stan Honey founded Etak. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102766595 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10276659...
- Animats 3y ago
  I have several of the gyro and inclinometer units, and the magnetometer compass, somewhere. The gyro was a motor spinning a flexible metal plate. As the vehicle moved, the plate would flex, and sensing the plate's position gave a rough turn rate. The inclinometer was a little sealed cup with four capacitive sensing plates. I was looking into using this for a robotics application, but it was too big for an R/C car sized vehicle.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
    I'm surprised they had a gyro (the article also only mentions a compass, which makes sense to remove accumulated errors in heading). I would have expected the wheel sensors to provide data of similar quality as a gyro back then, without the cost.
dang 3y ago
Related: Etak Navigator Tour and Demo [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202425 - July 2022 (1 comment) Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Navigation System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825 - Feb 2017 (83 comments)
teeray 3y ago
What is the style of UI used in that device and why did it have that characteristic angular look? I’ve seen it on other devices of the same vintage.
- izme 3y ago
  It's a vector display, similar to how an oscilloscope display works. Check out the Vectrex video game console for another great example.
- nickt 3y ago
  I love the look. They’ll be vector displays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
- lxgr 3y ago
  Do you maybe mean a vector monitor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
- klooney 3y ago
  Vector Graphics Display- you draw with lines instead of pixels.
- rescbr 3y ago
  The style is an artifact/limitation of using a vector display. Compare to today’s ubiquity of a raster display. Why did they choose to use a vector display? Maybe to decrease cost and avoid placing framebuffer memory? Maybe rendering maps directly to a vector display could be faster by skipping a rasterization process? Any other reason?
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Maps are intrinsically vector data, and a raster graphics display back then would have been low-res, 320x240 at most, making the map (and text!) really difficult to read. And then you’d need the rasterizer itself, using precious CPU cycles and memory bandwidth to turn perfect mathematical line segments into crude pixelated approximations. And yes, the memory needed for the framebuffer was also likely an issue. The question is more, why would they ever have used a raster monitor? None of the advantages of raster were applicable, and the disadvantages were all relevant in their use case. The 100% obvious choice was vector.
jandrese 3y ago
It is amazing that they got it to work as well as it did given how it was 15-20 years ahead of its time. Sure the unit ended up costing as much as the car it was mounted in, but given the limitations of the technology of the time that is simply amazing. To get an idea of how ahead of its time this is, it wouldn't be until a year after the release that High Sierra formatting for CD-ROMs would be proposed. A CD Drive would have added even more expense, but it should would have beat out swapping around dozens of cassettes. I wonder how much memory it had. The contemporary PC-XT using the same chip started out with 128kb but could be expanded to 640kb. One can imagine it had to page data in and out of that slow cassette interface quite regularly as you're driving around.
- xixixao 3y ago
  It was $4000 in today’s dollars, unlikely that it would have been installed in such a cheap car (1985 car prices[0]). Interesting that it cost about as much as the Apple Vision Pro. Probably had way more utility for its buyers. [0] https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile/1985combca.pdf?rev=7a343730dd8949348e5ebf132285caa7 https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile...
defrost 3y ago
etak (navigation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak_(navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak_(navigation) a word of Micronesian origin for a distinctive cognitive and mnemonic approach to oceanic navigation and orientation involving a notional reference point or "island", called etak, and triangulation based on it. ... the use of a relative frame, in which the boat is considered to be at rest, while the etak moves.
SamBam 3y ago
The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA). The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances is that if you're a fraction of a degree off you may miss your destination and never know it, so it's also vitally important to know how far you've gone. This is hard when there are no landmarks. The navigators estimated their distance by using intermediary islands off to the side, which they viewed as coming towards them (from their point of view, the navigator stays motionless on the open ocean while the world moves towards them) and past them. These reference islands were called etaks. However, confusingly, the etaks were generally not visible, being beyond the horizon, and sometimes did not even exist. The navigators would have named etaks that they pictured being just over the horizon, whether they were there or not, and would track their procession past their boat. When the set number of etaks had passed, they would know they were in the vicinity of the destination island. If they were not at the right time of day for birds to be out, they would then hang out in the area waiting to spot the birds leaving or returning at dawn or dusk. So the system involves dead reckoning plus a system of turning the navigators' own well-developed intuition of how far they had travelled into a formalized system of generally-invisible islands that they used as a mental model to externalize this intuition. (My knowledge of this is from Cognition in the wild, Hutchins, E., 1995.) Edit: D'oh, I should have finished TFA. This is described at the end, although more roughly.
- Affric 3y ago
  Thank you for the fascinating comment and book recommendation. Felt the article was heavy on ad copy and graphics.
- Thtjifiti 3y ago
  This sounds very romantic, but they were mostly at drift. Most very using rafts without any form of propulsion. "Navigation" across wast distances was one way road with no return ticket. They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some explorative spirit.
neilv 3y ago
1991 home video demo of an Etak, in a custom housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s (Bet they didn't think at the time that techies of the future would be watching it in 2024 on the ubiquitous global data network.)
- delichon 3y ago
  We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use to identify the era.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking the people who were showing this advanced tech thing were also likely the ones who could extrapolate where online was going. But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the future would be interested in the home video they were making?
    - fragmede 3y ago
      only as much as you think Kubernetes will be a historical fascination 200 years from now.
  - saulpw 3y ago
    That was 1995. In 1991, we had the ubiquitous intercontinental phone network, but overseas connections were >$1/minute and data rate was only 9600 baud.
    - sbierwagen 3y ago
      Stretching the definition a little, satellite TV had been a thing for years by then. Neiman Marcus was selling satellite dishes in 1979.
YouWhy 3y ago
Highly inspiring! Will share with my team (and I don't do that often!) It seems that Etak was to navigation systems what Jodorowsky's Dune was to 1980s sci-fi: a trail blazing endeavour that was wild and wildly innovative, did not fulfill its intended mission but rather set up an entire field for subsequent success. Also: the design must have included several masterpieces when considering the state of tech in the 1980s: even seeking to the right point on the map cassette is an untrivially hard problem.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Do you mean David Lynch’s Dune? Jodorowsky’s attempt was in the 70s and was never released.
  - YouWhy 3y ago
    I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development. What I wanted to point out is that both projects produced massive amounts of reusable knowledge, and that knowledge set up the stage for a whole field of influential and exciting derivative works.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      > I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development. You seem to be responding to another comment? Or are putting words in the commenters’ mouth?
      - YouWhy 3y ago
        I was responding to the "Jodorowsky’s attempt was ... never released" critique by trying to expand on both the similarities and dissimilarities between Etak and Jodorowsky's Dune.
baybal2 3y ago
[dead]
lbrindze 3y ago
Stan Honey other claim to fame (other than being literally the best yacht navigator, probably ever) was founding Sportsvision, the company that created the yellow 1st down line you see when you watch football on tv.
asimpleusecase 3y ago
Back in the day the first “computer graphics” class we had at uni was on a tektronix 4010. You would build 3D models and rotate them and display the movement on the monitor. This was when all screens were green text only in a time share system.
mvkel 3y ago
Fantastic story. > When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni. What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them.
- stavros 3y ago
  > incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them. I'd think that it's everyone else at Apple who's slinging code with the best of them.
  - mvkel 3y ago
    Yes, sorry. That's exactly what I meant to say! Pioneers.
- epstein 3y ago
  Now I understand why apple maps so bad.
- trillic 3y ago
  Stan Honey, heavily mentioned in the article, most famous for his contributions to sailing, also built the yellow first down line graphic were used to seeing in American football.
teleforce 3y ago
>Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced iPhone in 2007. Interestingly, one of Etak co-founders was Nolan Bushnell, and he was Atari co-founder that hired Steve Jobs (or specifically Allan Alcorn) in his only full-time job prior to Apple, pardon the pun.
- Centigonal 3y ago
  Not to mention the founder of that most estimable chain, Charles Entertainment Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre.
- georgemcbay 3y ago
  A very long time ago (~1996-1997) I worked for a company in Sunnyvale called Vicinity which made mapblast, a website now so lost to time that google will assume you are typoing mapquest if you search for it. The company was eventually sold (well after I had left) to Microsoft and became part of MSN I believe. The tech behind mapblast also powered the first version of Yahoo Maps, which was a pretty big deal at the time (this was before Google Maps eventually came in and overshadowed everyone else in that market). I was in my early 20s and working for one of my first tech startups at the time but Vicinity was primarily made up of graybeards who had previously worked for Etak (who was the primary map data provider for the online mapping system we made, so they had a lot of experience with it) and many of those people were also ex-Atari prior to Etak.
  - jmbwell 3y ago
    Being buried by Google because there’s a more marketable search result isn’t the same as being lost to time. Not yet anyway
- apetresc 3y ago
  Sorry, what's the pun? I can't find it.
  - thombat 3y ago
light_hue_1 3y ago
> To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a process to match the position given by the navigation sensors to a topologically correct electronic map. Whenever the vehicle turned you made the assumption that you’re driving on a road. At that point the location could be ‘snapped’ back to the road and the error from the sensors could be reset. This technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is still in use today. No way did they invent this. Not even close! This is called map matching. It predates Etak by at least 20 years, if not more. This paper was published a decade before which does exactly this: Lezniak TW, Lewis RW, Mcmillen RA. A dead reckoning/map correlation system for automatic vehicle tracking. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. 1977 Feb;26(1):47-60. The government was building out this technology in the 50s, here's a RAND report about that. https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/RM0756-1%20Survey%20of%20Self-Contained%20Navigation%20Systems.pdf https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/... I suspect there are even earlier examples.
- kqr 3y ago
  This was my sense as well. The device looks and is described like something I would not be surprised to find on a 1970s warship or spy plane to aid navigation. Not with street maps, specifically, of course, but something similar! Still impressive to get it into a consumer-sized (and almost consumer-priced) box.
- lsaferite 3y ago
  I mean, if that paper wasn't declassified until 2017, what are they chances they knew about the prior art exactly? I'm not disputing your assertion, but perhaps I'm a little more charitable in thinking they could have independently invented the same thing and believed they were the first since the one you mentioned was apparently classified.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Right. Independent invention happens all the time.
  - light_hue_1 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much more willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions of products. $4000 in todays money is almost the same as Apple Vision Pro, for a product that has very limited usability. May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish to show off then? Since the fall of Vertu no tech companies seem to address specifically this segment. Or may be people just were more optimistic about tech?
- Centigonal 3y ago
  Is that true, though? Etak had to license their tech and court a buyer shortly after going to market. Meanwhile, Apple has sold over 200k Vision Pro headsets.
- guenthert 3y ago
  > One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much more willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions of products. I'd rather think that there is more money frivolously spent today; in the S.F. Bay Area, much more. > May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish to show off then? I'm quite perplexed about how your perception can be so very different from mine. How many people own a Tesla in your neighborhood? This device however, I would have thought, would have been marketed chiefly to professionals. Traveling salesmen, doctors (who then still made house calls), service technicians etc. .
LaundroMat 3y ago
That the system would only show you your destination, but not how to get there is very appealing to me (as well as its display). I'd pay for a CRT Waze skin and the option to turn off turn-by-turn navigation.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  And then you'd play "I'm Tickled Pink" on the speakers with not enough bass and drive your Chryslus Corvega into the sunset? :P
RicoElectrico 3y ago
> The second key invention was a ‘heading up’, moving map display. This meant that the vehicle remained at the center of the screen and the map moved and turned under the vehicle. What you saw ahead of you in the windshield was what was displayed on the screen. This proved highly intuitive. Later on they talk about "heads up" map digitizing, did this mean the map rotated as the operator digitized the street? Seems quite unwieldy (and how did the poor PC rotate raster graphics?)
- toast0 3y ago
  I don't think so... I think heads up for the digitizing indicates that the digital map was overlayed on top of the (scanned) source image? As opposed to digitizing from a paper map where you have the map on a surface in front of you, and a digital map hopefully on a screen in front of you (but they did say some were digitizing blind before this?) and you're trying to get the digitized version right by looking between the two. For the in car map, a vector CRT and vector data makes rotation reasonable. Much less hard than rotating rasterized scanned images on a PC with no rotation acceleration.
  - ghostly_s 3y ago
    I’m guessing the 'blind' method looked something like using one of the early graphics tablets to trace routes or tap control points on a paper map according to a sequence displayed on a text terminal, with no graphical feedback to confirm the vector data during input.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      in 1988 i was doing an internship at a company designing ship propulsion systems. they had a CAD computer with with a huge screen and tablet. not sure how old that device was or how expensive but i guess in '85 the technology was not far away. digitizing blind at that point would mostly be used because it was cheaper than getting a graphics capable computer. using a projector instead of a screen would be enough to devise a system where the digital image is shown on top of a printed map. so when they came up with that idea they probably already had most of the pieces they need to make it work.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Bosch EVA (1983) "The prototype driver navigation system was unveiled in Hildesheim on June 21, 1983, and it proved groundbreaking: EVA was the first ever experimental autonomous navigation system." https://www.bosch.com/stories/eva-first-navigation-system-from-bosch/ https://www.bosch.com/stories/eva-first-navigation-system-fr... (no map, but display and address to address with route finding)
- sllabres 3y ago
  Very interesting, i've just yesterday wrote about the successor of EVA, the TravelPilot IDS [1] which was commercially available. But I didn't knew that there was another system 5 years ahead. Both (Etak and TravelPilot IDS) seems to use kind of a vector display. Does someone know if this is for better resolution or better contrast, or both or if there is another reason? https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-system-travelpilot-ids-1989-60605.html https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-sys...
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    There is no conventional resolution to vector displays (though monitors have limitations). Reminds me at one point in time I owned a Vectrex, which had much cleaner lines than any other console, even much better than my later, much more expensive Amiga or (early) PCs. "This Vectrex does things I never thought possible" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM Only got that feeling back with Retina displays.
    - bsenftner 3y ago
      I worked at the company that made the Vectrex, Jay Smith was a wonderful guy. Super brilliant too: the world of PSX Bowling games was his creation, he wrote the first bowling physics sim using Excel, and we hired some guy with a PhD in Statistics who wrote Jay's algorithm in assembly for the PSX, and the 3D bowling genre was launched.
      - 3y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  Virtually all car navigation software, or phone GPS apps in driving mode, will "snap" to a nearby road if the GPS indicates that you are traveling parallel to one. This compensates for minor GPS reception errors. This can occasionally, in rare situations, be a problem, if you have frontage roads very close to a highway, they can sometimes get confused about which road you are actually on.
  - guenthert 3y ago
    In car navigation software it's not all that rare. Chances are the maps are out of date, perhaps by quite a few years (because manufacturers ask for absurd prices on map updates) and you're traveling on a road which doesn't yet exist on the map ...
  - hoseja 3y ago
    It LOVES to happen on complicated in-construction off-grade intersections, where you usually need the navigation the most.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    I love when I've been traveling at highway speed down a highway for over an hour, and suddenly my GPS starts giving me directions back to the highway from some nearby parallel road when I haven't so much as passed an exit.
  - myself248 3y ago
    It's incessant for me; a significant part of one of my frequent routes is on the service-drive that parallels a major freeway, after taking an exit, but prior to diverging. Depending on traffic, though, it may also be advantageous to stay on the freeway, so both are valid parts of the route. If Waze instructs me to take the exit, then it assumes I'm on the service drive, even if GPS says I'm still on the freeway. And vice-versa, more problematically -- if I impulsively take the exit, it assumes I'm still on the freeway even if GPS clearly shows I'm on the service drive. (I can confirm this by running a spare laptop with a USB GPS as a logger, while my iPhone runs Waze. Overlay the GPX on a map later and it's super obvious whether I took the exit or not, but either the Apple location provider or Waze staunchly ignores reality in favor of obsessive road snapping.) Where this gets stupid is, if there's a traffic jam on the freeway and I dip onto the exit to avoid it, now Waze sees me flowing freely down the service drive, assumes that it's the freeway that's flowing freely, and disbelieves other users who report traffic there. Even as the service drive curves and diverges and I follow the curve, it doesn't retroactively say "Oh jeez, he must be on the service drive after all, adjust the previous data to apply to the service drive and not to the freeway!". So the bad data continues to corrupt the traffic picture and encourage other users to get stuck in traffic they can't report.
wengo314 3y ago
> The cassette tape in an Etak Navigator was read at about 200cm (80″) per second! i struggle to imagine how did the tape handle it.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  That must be a typo, has to be. That's, what, 20-80 rotations per second for a regular cassette tape?!
  - webstrand 3y ago
    I found it in the official brochure from Etak printed in 1984, it says "80 ips" <http://honeynav.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/brochure-Worlds-1st-Nav-Sys_The-ETAK-Navigator.pdf http://honeynav.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/brochure-Worl...>
- webstrand 3y ago
  I found a contemporary source <http://archive.informationdisplay.org/Portals/InformationDisplay/IssuePDF/V00N00-1985-7%20July%20Small.pdf http://archive.informationdisplay.org/Portals/InformationDis...> > Compact tape drive. which uses 1/4-in. magnetic tape cassettes operating at 80 ips, each containing every street and specific address, for an area about twice that of an ordinary paper street map, as well as overviews of major state and regional roads, and national interstates (installed under the vehicle dashboard or in the glove compartment). So it seems that, if it's not 80 inches per second, then the confusion dates at least back to 1985! another source <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf> also reports: > TAPE DRIVE > 5” x 2 3/4” x 3 3/4" 80 ips
  - rasz 3y ago
    > 1/4-in. magnetic tape Tape shown in the video demonstration of Etak was ordinary 1/8 Philips 4 x 2 1/2 x 1/2. >another source <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf> Dimensions are for a Tape Drive so that matches Philips cassette. Speed is 40x normal, but reading https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the_compact_cassette/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the... "The actual production of Musicassettes was done on machines running 32 times faster than normal playback. Cassette tape would be reeled over four heads recording what would be both sides at once at 60 IPS. The master tape that was source of the original music had been recorded at 7.5 IPS and this would also run 32 times faster, clocking up a playback speed of 240 IPS for duplication purposes." "This super-fast tape transport also required the circuitry to follow suit. So instead of the bias frequency being around 80kHz, it was now 2.4MHz; the amplifiers also needed to work over a frequency range of 200kHz to 500kHz." Commodore 64 with best tape Turbo is able to store slightly above 1MB per cassette. Japan already had floppy drives capable of storing over 1MB in 1983, but it looks like Etak needed more, with this 40 times faster tape drive delivering: "local map data base stored on a 3.5-MByte tape cassette." I would love to learn more details about this drive. Modulation used? Number of tracks? Format? Magnetic flux dump of one of the cassettes would be a lovely puzzle to decode.
m463 3y ago
I had a friend who had one of these in the mid-90's. It was pretty cool (at the time) I remember installation wasn't trivial. It needed a lot of futzing with the car. I remember the wheel rotation sensors, and they are briefly mentioned in the article. Smazing that nowadays all this stuff is solid state and in your pocket.
- stavros 3y ago
  None of this stuff is solid state. What's solid state is completely different stuff, namely GPS. There's also a gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass, but I don't know if those can be considered solid state.
fs111 3y ago
When I started working at TeleAtlas Germany (former Robert Bosch Data; forever a part of TomTom now) in 2005 we still had production processes on the MapEngine technology coming from Etak. We had in-house python bindings that allowed for very productive development. It is fun to see this mentioned here today.
ugur2nd 3y ago
I'm interested in this kind of thing. How things work and so on, the mechanisms and algorithms behind it. The article is long and I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I upvoted it to read it later. That way it's easy to access.
ZFH 3y ago
How timely! I was watching a video about the ill fated Vector W8 supercar last night, and wondered about that awesome CRT proto-GPS thing seen in some shots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs
- Solvency 3y ago
  [flagged]
- netsharc 3y ago
  Terribly written article (there's no flow to the writing, the author seemed to have just listed bullet points off a PowerPoint notes section), and a blurry video with cringy narration. To complete it, here's an HD video tour of the Vector W8's screens: https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 , presented by a slightly annoying YouTuber.
bsenftner 3y ago
My first job after undergrad ('88) was creating a Mac-like GUI for Etak for a vehicle tracking company in Los Angeles. GUIs were still new, DOS was still king, I had experience working on the Mac OS as a beta OS developer, and I'd been working in a 3D graphics research lab (yeah, 3D graphics was research back then), and this company named TeleTrak needed a real time updating map. So I made the GUI for their mapping application, using my knowledge from writing early Mac GUIs, 2D video games and early 3D graphics. Etak was literally Alienware, in it's data structures and extremely efficient processing. Where I'd been expecting significantly slower performance, I'd made a foundation expecting to use various tricks used to the game industry to make it appear like things were happening while loads occurred and so on. None of that was necessary, as Etak was the fastest aspect of the entire software bundle. A single 386 PC with a some type of memory expansion so each had an additional 1MB of RAM above the ordinary 640KB would run the software, and the software was capable of real time tracking above 30fps around 20 vehicles. If tracking a single vehicle, the mapping was fluid with at-the-time incredibly sexy real time 30fps rotations of the map as the vehicle turned corners. While working there, PacTel bought the company. Renamed PacTel TeleTrak, the company suddenly had tours from US and Israeli military brass, so I quit.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage? Your programming is constantly focused, not on the limitations this imposes, but on the opportunities opened up by this vast blank canvas like never before. Imagine what it would be like if programmers still got as much user-utility per user-kilobyte as they did when that's all they had. Back in 1982 with the mass-production of Ataris I thought it would be good to have a cartridge for each city which had the map data plus the visual landmarks. Like a 3-D driving simulator but using real maps. Which could be played as a racing game, I guess something like GTA. And with further development would provide a framework for on-board navigation using a battery-powered computer. Just one of the many things you never expect early-adopters with more resources to not already be doing.
  - bsenftner 3y ago
flir 3y ago
Reminds me a little of Sir Clive Sinclair's early products - someone who could see what gadgets the future wanted, but didn't quite have the technology to create them (eg the portable "flat-screen" TV with the side-mounted electron gun).
noemit 3y ago
Nolan told me he invented this so it would be easier for him to go sailing.
NKosmatos 3y ago
Wow, this is a fantastic story. It would make a good documentary!
jhdias 3y ago
Also... 1981 https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091030/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091030/
barnabee 3y ago
Does anyone else wish they could configure modern sat nav apps to have a simplified map display/UI somewhat in that style?
- atemerev 3y ago
  Vector displays are fascinating. I am trying to emulate the UI occasionally.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m3kw9 3y ago
The tape search is really fascinating
bambax 3y ago
Fascinating article. About this: > Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called ‘dead reckoning‘. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are. > To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a process to match the position given by the navigation sensors to a topologically correct electronic map. Whenever the vehicle turned you made the assumption that you’re driving on a road. At that point the location could be ‘snapped’ back to the road and the error from the sensors could be reset. This technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is still in use today. Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by blocking the signal between the pilot and the drone; and it's also possible to jam GPS signal. But a drone that would use some version of "augmented dead reckoning" with a (relatively basic) analysis of features on the ground (roads, rivers, train tracks) would be able to guide itself without external input and would be virtually unstoppable (short of destruction). Yet they don't seem to exist yet? Is this harder to do than it sounds?
- jelkand 3y ago
  That sounds like inertial navigation with nav fixes, which predates GPS. It certainly does exist.
- brk 3y ago
  >Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by blocking the signal >between the pilot and the drone; Curious which country you are in where you see this occurring.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Singapore, Germany, the UK, USA, Australia, .. countries with airports that want domestic security, etc. https://www.trd.sg/ https://www.trd.sg/ https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/ https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/ etc. Once you start looking at GPS spoofing, etc. it gets quasi-military, non-commercial, requires credentiuals | LEO contacts, ways to work around checks and balances: https://www.regulus.com/ https://www.regulus.com/ is Israeli miltech, other companies in other countries are similar.
hasoleju 3y ago
Now I know why the cursor from the old asteroids game looks like the position indicator in my car navigation. Great fun fact! The Atari Team which created the game was located next to the company that built the first navigation device.
gizmo 3y ago
One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too unreliable, too complicated. I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But ultimately the products didn't deliver on the vision. It wasn't until the iPod and capacitive touch screens and tiny hard drives came to the market that the iPhone became possible. Being 20 years early doesn't help. Similar catastrophically flawed research projects get started today. In the past couple of days the Humane AI pin has been in the news. It's a wearable AI gadget that seems cool but it doesn't work. The tech has to catch up to the vision. It's at least a decade ahead of its time.
- amadeoeoeo 3y ago
  Isn't this a necessary part on the innovation path?
  - gizmo 3y ago
    When smart people work on hard problems this usually comes with positive externalities. Even when the tech ends up worthless the the engineers will have learned a ton. I don't think that having people work on technology that is ahead of its time is bad for society. I think it's effectively high budget university research that presents itself as a commercial endeavor. How much does silicon valley invest into these doomed sci-fi projects annually? Many hundreds of millions at least. I suspect PhDs at a university could produce a lot more innovation at a fraction of the cost.
  - mavhc 3y ago
    Given that the tech and people went on to be involved in future nav systems, yes. I imagine all that work digitising the maps was used again and again for a few decades, and the people brought their hard won knowledge to newer systems
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important, because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology, tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they did, when they sold the company through the chain of acquisitions that ended up with them at TomTom and with TomTom in control of their patent portfolio.
cpr 3y ago
And, of course, the Asteroids Atari game sure looks like a version of the original Star Wars game on the PDP-1 from MIT I used to play in the Harvard grad computing center...
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  There actually was a cabinet called "Space Wars" that was a coin-op implementation of Spacewar. https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars
mempko 3y ago
Around the same time as Etak was Navteq. Navteq didn't build an in-car navigation system, but did build accurate map and the ability to provide turn by turn directions. Etak could not provide directions and just showed a map. Navteq had kiosks around SF where you could get a printed map with directions. Navteq eventually created the map used by all in-car navigation systems. It turns out great ideas happen around the same time. Computers became powerful enough that map digitization became possible. The confluence of technologies (all government funded, fyi) like computers, digital maps, and GPS, allows us to have a little square computer in our pockets that can tell us where we are in the world and how to get to where we want to go.
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Wasn’t there something from Honda with transparent film analog maps?
jacobcoro 3y ago
Halt and catch fire vibes. Wonderful story
Archelaos 3y ago
Here is a video worth watching about a similar project at Siemens in Munich from 1973, 12 years earlier (voice in German, English auto-translated subtitles available): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6BcwCMumo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6BcwCMumo
jagged-chisel 3y ago
> By today’s standards it was also supremely difficult and tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how to get there. If by "today's standards" you mean "ask a computer and it just does it for you," then sure. But this is by no means difficult and involves the most minor tedium. Want to get from Nashville to Charleston? Grab a US atlas, hold your straight edge to connect the two cities. Find the highways that connect the two close to the straight line. Signage abounds along the way. If you know Charleston, SC is generally east and a bit south, you can likely follow signage mostly without the map. Maybe you need a Nashville-level street map to get to the highway, and maybe one for Charleston to find your hotel. But tedious? Not especially. Without signs, and needing to measure each leg? Or asking locals along the way? Now that's tedious.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
Somewhat off topic. What do big military submarines use these days to navigate? Do they have nav systems based on topographic data of the sea floor? (I dont know if it is mapped to the degree its possible). Could that be read accurately with only passiv sensors? I think you could read it perfectly with sonar whatever that may have evolved into these days. I guess they could reach depth where they can poke an extraordinarily long antenna to the surface and talk to GPS systems? (I dont know if such an antenna exists but it would make sense)
- Razengan 3y ago
  Cthulhu guides the navigators via dreams.
- ses1984 3y ago
  I guess they don't need to map the whole sea floor, just enough landmarks.
  - ThinkBeat 3y ago
    The more the better I would assume. I would guess some areas are boringly flat and easy, while other regions are full of obstacles and problems. I have read, but I cannot verify that the South China Sea is filled with obstacles and trouble, some they alleged China has created by sinking ships / crates / Supposedly to make it more difficult to navigate by submarine.
    - ses1984 3y ago
      Big military subs are platforms for icbms. They don’t need to be in the South China Sea. They don’t need to be anywhere. They just need to be hidden.
- wbl 3y ago
  Inertial navigation complemented with occasional GPS fixes.
Daub 3y ago
Time to plug my dear father's book 'The Principles of Arab Navigation'. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28/dp/B01FELBIPU https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28...
OJFord 3y ago
Quite incredible that so much of the innovation (perfectly recognisable and fundamentally still the same today) came in a single product. Alright fine 'six tapes to cover the San Francisco bay area' is not so recognisable, and pretty funny, but otherwise!
jefurii 3y ago
I'd love to see a modern system that had all the niceties like GPS, music, bluetooth but with an evolved multi-function display (MFD) with keypad entry. Touchscreens in cars are a terrible idea.
fudged71 3y ago
This feels remarkably similar to the Humane Pin
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Completely ahead of its time. Navigation without GPS is unthinkable today...

982 points by MBCook 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago

Did that interface inspire the PipBoy in the first Fallout game 12 years later?

treve 3y ago
It's possible, but it's also similar to other vector graphics from the time.
ghostly_s 3y ago
There were CRT based in-car record keeping systems used in police cars for a long time before laptops replaced them which had a very similar form factor.
ramigb 3y ago
I came here to say the same thing but I searched if someone else mentioned it. so thank you :D insane nostalgia

myself248 3y ago

I have a fantasy that someone reverse-engineers the tape data format and is able to render new maps to it. For the 2 etak systems still operational out there...

skykooler 3y ago

What happened to the original units? Are there any left?

sanxiyn 3y ago
Apparently Computer History Museum has one, catalog number 102766595, "Gift of Stan Honey". Stan Honey founded Etak. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102766595 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10276659...
Animats 3y ago
I have several of the gyro and inclinometer units, and the magnetometer compass, somewhere. The gyro was a motor spinning a flexible metal plate. As the vehicle moved, the plate would flex, and sensing the plate's position gave a rough turn rate. The inclinometer was a little sealed cup with four capacitive sensing plates. I was looking into using this for a robotics application, but it was too big for an R/C car sized vehicle.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  I'm surprised they had a gyro (the article also only mentions a compass, which makes sense to remove accumulated errors in heading). I would have expected the wheel sensors to provide data of similar quality as a gyro back then, without the cost.

dang 3y ago

Related: Etak Navigator Tour and Demo [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202425 - July 2022 (1 comment) Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Navigation System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825 - Feb 2017 (83 comments)

teeray 3y ago

What is the style of UI used in that device and why did it have that characteristic angular look? I’ve seen it on other devices of the same vintage.

izme 3y ago
It's a vector display, similar to how an oscilloscope display works. Check out the Vectrex video game console for another great example.
nickt 3y ago
I love the look. They’ll be vector displays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
lxgr 3y ago
Do you maybe mean a vector monitor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
klooney 3y ago
Vector Graphics Display- you draw with lines instead of pixels.
rescbr 3y ago
The style is an artifact/limitation of using a vector display. Compare to today’s ubiquity of a raster display. Why did they choose to use a vector display? Maybe to decrease cost and avoid placing framebuffer memory? Maybe rendering maps directly to a vector display could be faster by skipping a rasterization process? Any other reason?
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Maps are intrinsically vector data, and a raster graphics display back then would have been low-res, 320x240 at most, making the map (and text!) really difficult to read. And then you’d need the rasterizer itself, using precious CPU cycles and memory bandwidth to turn perfect mathematical line segments into crude pixelated approximations. And yes, the memory needed for the framebuffer was also likely an issue. The question is more, why would they ever have used a raster monitor? None of the advantages of raster were applicable, and the disadvantages were all relevant in their use case. The 100% obvious choice was vector.

jandrese 3y ago

It is amazing that they got it to work as well as it did given how it was 15-20 years ahead of its time. Sure the unit ended up costing as much as the car it was mounted in, but given the limitations of the technology of the time that is simply amazing. To get an idea of how ahead of its time this is, it wouldn't be until a year after the release that High Sierra formatting for CD-ROMs would be proposed. A CD Drive would have added even more expense, but it should would have beat out swapping around dozens of cassettes. I wonder how much memory it had. The contemporary PC-XT using the same chip started out with 128kb but could be expanded to 640kb. One can imagine it had to page data in and out of that slow cassette interface quite regularly as you're driving around.

xixixao 3y ago
It was $4000 in today’s dollars, unlikely that it would have been installed in such a cheap car (1985 car prices[0]). Interesting that it cost about as much as the Apple Vision Pro. Probably had way more utility for its buyers. [0] https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile/1985combca.pdf?rev=7a343730dd8949348e5ebf132285caa7 https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile...

defrost 3y ago

etak (navigation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak_(navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak_(navigation) a word of Micronesian origin for a distinctive cognitive and mnemonic approach to oceanic navigation and orientation involving a notional reference point or "island", called etak, and triangulation based on it. ... the use of a relative frame, in which the boat is considered to be at rest, while the etak moves.

SamBam 3y ago

The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA). The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances is that if you're a fraction of a degree off you may miss your destination and never know it, so it's also vitally important to know how far you've gone. This is hard when there are no landmarks. The navigators estimated their distance by using intermediary islands off to the side, which they viewed as coming towards them (from their point of view, the navigator stays motionless on the open ocean while the world moves towards them) and past them. These reference islands were called etaks. However, confusingly, the etaks were generally not visible, being beyond the horizon, and sometimes did not even exist. The navigators would have named etaks that they pictured being just over the horizon, whether they were there or not, and would track their procession past their boat. When the set number of etaks had passed, they would know they were in the vicinity of the destination island. If they were not at the right time of day for birds to be out, they would then hang out in the area waiting to spot the birds leaving or returning at dawn or dusk. So the system involves dead reckoning plus a system of turning the navigators' own well-developed intuition of how far they had travelled into a formalized system of generally-invisible islands that they used as a mental model to externalize this intuition. (My knowledge of this is from Cognition in the wild, Hutchins, E., 1995.) Edit: D'oh, I should have finished TFA. This is described at the end, although more roughly.

Affric 3y ago
Thank you for the fascinating comment and book recommendation. Felt the article was heavy on ad copy and graphics.
Thtjifiti 3y ago
This sounds very romantic, but they were mostly at drift. Most very using rafts without any form of propulsion. "Navigation" across wast distances was one way road with no return ticket. They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some explorative spirit.

neilv 3y ago

1991 home video demo of an Etak, in a custom housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s (Bet they didn't think at the time that techies of the future would be watching it in 2024 on the ubiquitous global data network.)

delichon 3y ago
We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use to identify the era.
- neilv 3y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking the people who were showing this advanced tech thing were also likely the ones who could extrapolate where online was going. But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the future would be interested in the home video they were making?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    only as much as you think Kubernetes will be a historical fascination 200 years from now.
- saulpw 3y ago
  That was 1995. In 1991, we had the ubiquitous intercontinental phone network, but overseas connections were >$1/minute and data rate was only 9600 baud.
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    Stretching the definition a little, satellite TV had been a thing for years by then. Neiman Marcus was selling satellite dishes in 1979.

YouWhy 3y ago

Highly inspiring! Will share with my team (and I don't do that often!) It seems that Etak was to navigation systems what Jodorowsky's Dune was to 1980s sci-fi: a trail blazing endeavour that was wild and wildly innovative, did not fulfill its intended mission but rather set up an entire field for subsequent success. Also: the design must have included several masterpieces when considering the state of tech in the 1980s: even seeking to the right point on the map cassette is an untrivially hard problem.

iainmerrick 3y ago
Do you mean David Lynch’s Dune? Jodorowsky’s attempt was in the 70s and was never released.
- YouWhy 3y ago
  I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development. What I wanted to point out is that both projects produced massive amounts of reusable knowledge, and that knowledge set up the stage for a whole field of influential and exciting derivative works.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    > I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development. You seem to be responding to another comment? Or are putting words in the commenters’ mouth?
    - YouWhy 3y ago
      I was responding to the "Jodorowsky’s attempt was ... never released" critique by trying to expand on both the similarities and dissimilarities between Etak and Jodorowsky's Dune.

baybal2 3y ago

[dead]

lbrindze 3y ago

Stan Honey other claim to fame (other than being literally the best yacht navigator, probably ever) was founding Sportsvision, the company that created the yellow 1st down line you see when you watch football on tv.

asimpleusecase 3y ago

Back in the day the first “computer graphics” class we had at uni was on a tektronix 4010. You would build 3D models and rotate them and display the movement on the monitor. This was when all screens were green text only in a time share system.

mvkel 3y ago

Fantastic story. > When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni. What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them.

stavros 3y ago
> incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them. I'd think that it's everyone else at Apple who's slinging code with the best of them.
- mvkel 3y ago
  Yes, sorry. That's exactly what I meant to say! Pioneers.
epstein 3y ago
Now I understand why apple maps so bad.
trillic 3y ago
Stan Honey, heavily mentioned in the article, most famous for his contributions to sailing, also built the yellow first down line graphic were used to seeing in American football.

teleforce 3y ago

>Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced iPhone in 2007. Interestingly, one of Etak co-founders was Nolan Bushnell, and he was Atari co-founder that hired Steve Jobs (or specifically Allan Alcorn) in his only full-time job prior to Apple, pardon the pun.

Centigonal 3y ago
Not to mention the founder of that most estimable chain, Charles Entertainment Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre.
georgemcbay 3y ago
A very long time ago (~1996-1997) I worked for a company in Sunnyvale called Vicinity which made mapblast, a website now so lost to time that google will assume you are typoing mapquest if you search for it. The company was eventually sold (well after I had left) to Microsoft and became part of MSN I believe. The tech behind mapblast also powered the first version of Yahoo Maps, which was a pretty big deal at the time (this was before Google Maps eventually came in and overshadowed everyone else in that market). I was in my early 20s and working for one of my first tech startups at the time but Vicinity was primarily made up of graybeards who had previously worked for Etak (who was the primary map data provider for the online mapping system we made, so they had a lot of experience with it) and many of those people were also ex-Atari prior to Etak.
- jmbwell 3y ago
  Being buried by Google because there’s a more marketable search result isn’t the same as being lost to time. Not yet anyway
apetresc 3y ago
Sorry, what's the pun? I can't find it.
- thombat 3y ago

light_hue_1 3y ago

> To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a process to match the position given by the navigation sensors to a topologically correct electronic map. Whenever the vehicle turned you made the assumption that you’re driving on a road. At that point the location could be ‘snapped’ back to the road and the error from the sensors could be reset. This technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is still in use today. No way did they invent this. Not even close! This is called map matching. It predates Etak by at least 20 years, if not more. This paper was published a decade before which does exactly this: Lezniak TW, Lewis RW, Mcmillen RA. A dead reckoning/map correlation system for automatic vehicle tracking. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. 1977 Feb;26(1):47-60. The government was building out this technology in the 50s, here's a RAND report about that. https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/RM0756-1%20Survey%20of%20Self-Contained%20Navigation%20Systems.pdf https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/... I suspect there are even earlier examples.

kqr 3y ago
This was my sense as well. The device looks and is described like something I would not be surprised to find on a 1970s warship or spy plane to aid navigation. Not with street maps, specifically, of course, but something similar! Still impressive to get it into a consumer-sized (and almost consumer-priced) box.
lsaferite 3y ago
I mean, if that paper wasn't declassified until 2017, what are they chances they knew about the prior art exactly? I'm not disputing your assertion, but perhaps I'm a little more charitable in thinking they could have independently invented the same thing and believed they were the first since the one you mentioned was apparently classified.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Right. Independent invention happens all the time.
- light_hue_1 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much more willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions of products. $4000 in todays money is almost the same as Apple Vision Pro, for a product that has very limited usability. May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish to show off then? Since the fall of Vertu no tech companies seem to address specifically this segment. Or may be people just were more optimistic about tech?

Centigonal 3y ago
Is that true, though? Etak had to license their tech and court a buyer shortly after going to market. Meanwhile, Apple has sold over 200k Vision Pro headsets.
guenthert 3y ago
> One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much more willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions of products. I'd rather think that there is more money frivolously spent today; in the S.F. Bay Area, much more. > May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish to show off then? I'm quite perplexed about how your perception can be so very different from mine. How many people own a Tesla in your neighborhood? This device however, I would have thought, would have been marketed chiefly to professionals. Traveling salesmen, doctors (who then still made house calls), service technicians etc. .

LaundroMat 3y ago

That the system would only show you your destination, but not how to get there is very appealing to me (as well as its display). I'd pay for a CRT Waze skin and the option to turn off turn-by-turn navigation.

moffkalast 3y ago
And then you'd play "I'm Tickled Pink" on the speakers with not enough bass and drive your Chryslus Corvega into the sunset? :P

RicoElectrico 3y ago

> The second key invention was a ‘heading up’, moving map display. This meant that the vehicle remained at the center of the screen and the map moved and turned under the vehicle. What you saw ahead of you in the windshield was what was displayed on the screen. This proved highly intuitive. Later on they talk about "heads up" map digitizing, did this mean the map rotated as the operator digitized the street? Seems quite unwieldy (and how did the poor PC rotate raster graphics?)

toast0 3y ago
I don't think so... I think heads up for the digitizing indicates that the digital map was overlayed on top of the (scanned) source image? As opposed to digitizing from a paper map where you have the map on a surface in front of you, and a digital map hopefully on a screen in front of you (but they did say some were digitizing blind before this?) and you're trying to get the digitized version right by looking between the two. For the in car map, a vector CRT and vector data makes rotation reasonable. Much less hard than rotating rasterized scanned images on a PC with no rotation acceleration.
- ghostly_s 3y ago
  I’m guessing the 'blind' method looked something like using one of the early graphics tablets to trace routes or tap control points on a paper map according to a sequence displayed on a text terminal, with no graphical feedback to confirm the vector data during input.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    in 1988 i was doing an internship at a company designing ship propulsion systems. they had a CAD computer with with a huge screen and tablet. not sure how old that device was or how expensive but i guess in '85 the technology was not far away. digitizing blind at that point would mostly be used because it was cheaper than getting a graphics capable computer. using a projector instead of a screen would be enough to devise a system where the digital image is shown on top of a printed map. so when they came up with that idea they probably already had most of the pieces they need to make it work.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Bosch EVA (1983) "The prototype driver navigation system was unveiled in Hildesheim on June 21, 1983, and it proved groundbreaking: EVA was the first ever experimental autonomous navigation system." https://www.bosch.com/stories/eva-first-navigation-system-from-bosch/ https://www.bosch.com/stories/eva-first-navigation-system-fr... (no map, but display and address to address with route finding)

sllabres 3y ago
Very interesting, i've just yesterday wrote about the successor of EVA, the TravelPilot IDS [1] which was commercially available. But I didn't knew that there was another system 5 years ahead. Both (Etak and TravelPilot IDS) seems to use kind of a vector display. Does someone know if this is for better resolution or better contrast, or both or if there is another reason? https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-system-travelpilot-ids-1989-60605.html https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-sys...
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  There is no conventional resolution to vector displays (though monitors have limitations). Reminds me at one point in time I owned a Vectrex, which had much cleaner lines than any other console, even much better than my later, much more expensive Amiga or (early) PCs. "This Vectrex does things I never thought possible" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM Only got that feeling back with Retina displays.
  - bsenftner 3y ago
    I worked at the company that made the Vectrex, Jay Smith was a wonderful guy. Super brilliant too: the world of PSX Bowling games was his creation, he wrote the first bowling physics sim using Excel, and we hired some guy with a PhD in Statistics who wrote Jay's algorithm in assembly for the PSX, and the 3D bowling genre was launched.
    - 3y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.

LeoPanthera 3y ago
Virtually all car navigation software, or phone GPS apps in driving mode, will "snap" to a nearby road if the GPS indicates that you are traveling parallel to one. This compensates for minor GPS reception errors. This can occasionally, in rare situations, be a problem, if you have frontage roads very close to a highway, they can sometimes get confused about which road you are actually on.
- guenthert 3y ago
  In car navigation software it's not all that rare. Chances are the maps are out of date, perhaps by quite a few years (because manufacturers ask for absurd prices on map updates) and you're traveling on a road which doesn't yet exist on the map ...
- hoseja 3y ago
  It LOVES to happen on complicated in-construction off-grade intersections, where you usually need the navigation the most.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  I love when I've been traveling at highway speed down a highway for over an hour, and suddenly my GPS starts giving me directions back to the highway from some nearby parallel road when I haven't so much as passed an exit.
- myself248 3y ago
  It's incessant for me; a significant part of one of my frequent routes is on the service-drive that parallels a major freeway, after taking an exit, but prior to diverging. Depending on traffic, though, it may also be advantageous to stay on the freeway, so both are valid parts of the route. If Waze instructs me to take the exit, then it assumes I'm on the service drive, even if GPS says I'm still on the freeway. And vice-versa, more problematically -- if I impulsively take the exit, it assumes I'm still on the freeway even if GPS clearly shows I'm on the service drive. (I can confirm this by running a spare laptop with a USB GPS as a logger, while my iPhone runs Waze. Overlay the GPX on a map later and it's super obvious whether I took the exit or not, but either the Apple location provider or Waze staunchly ignores reality in favor of obsessive road snapping.) Where this gets stupid is, if there's a traffic jam on the freeway and I dip onto the exit to avoid it, now Waze sees me flowing freely down the service drive, assumes that it's the freeway that's flowing freely, and disbelieves other users who report traffic there. Even as the service drive curves and diverges and I follow the curve, it doesn't retroactively say "Oh jeez, he must be on the service drive after all, adjust the previous data to apply to the service drive and not to the freeway!". So the bad data continues to corrupt the traffic picture and encourage other users to get stuck in traffic they can't report.

wengo314 3y ago

> The cassette tape in an Etak Navigator was read at about 200cm (80″) per second! i struggle to imagine how did the tape handle it.

isoprophlex 3y ago
That must be a typo, has to be. That's, what, 20-80 rotations per second for a regular cassette tape?!
- webstrand 3y ago
  I found it in the official brochure from Etak printed in 1984, it says "80 ips" <http://honeynav.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/brochure-Worlds-1st-Nav-Sys_The-ETAK-Navigator.pdf http://honeynav.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/brochure-Worl...>
webstrand 3y ago
I found a contemporary source <http://archive.informationdisplay.org/Portals/InformationDisplay/IssuePDF/V00N00-1985-7%20July%20Small.pdf http://archive.informationdisplay.org/Portals/InformationDis...> > Compact tape drive. which uses 1/4-in. magnetic tape cassettes operating at 80 ips, each containing every street and specific address, for an area about twice that of an ordinary paper street map, as well as overviews of major state and regional roads, and national interstates (installed under the vehicle dashboard or in the glove compartment). So it seems that, if it's not 80 inches per second, then the confusion dates at least back to 1985! another source <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf> also reports: > TAPE DRIVE > 5” x 2 3/4” x 3 3/4" 80 ips
- rasz 3y ago
  > 1/4-in. magnetic tape Tape shown in the video demonstration of Etak was ordinary 1/8 Philips 4 x 2 1/2 x 1/2. >another source <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf> Dimensions are for a Tape Drive so that matches Philips cassette. Speed is 40x normal, but reading https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the_compact_cassette/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the... "The actual production of Musicassettes was done on machines running 32 times faster than normal playback. Cassette tape would be reeled over four heads recording what would be both sides at once at 60 IPS. The master tape that was source of the original music had been recorded at 7.5 IPS and this would also run 32 times faster, clocking up a playback speed of 240 IPS for duplication purposes." "This super-fast tape transport also required the circuitry to follow suit. So instead of the bias frequency being around 80kHz, it was now 2.4MHz; the amplifiers also needed to work over a frequency range of 200kHz to 500kHz." Commodore 64 with best tape Turbo is able to store slightly above 1MB per cassette. Japan already had floppy drives capable of storing over 1MB in 1983, but it looks like Etak needed more, with this 40 times faster tape drive delivering: "local map data base stored on a 3.5-MByte tape cassette." I would love to learn more details about this drive. Modulation used? Number of tracks? Format? Magnetic flux dump of one of the cassettes would be a lovely puzzle to decode.

m463 3y ago

I had a friend who had one of these in the mid-90's. It was pretty cool (at the time) I remember installation wasn't trivial. It needed a lot of futzing with the car. I remember the wheel rotation sensors, and they are briefly mentioned in the article. Smazing that nowadays all this stuff is solid state and in your pocket.

stavros 3y ago
None of this stuff is solid state. What's solid state is completely different stuff, namely GPS. There's also a gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass, but I don't know if those can be considered solid state.

fs111 3y ago

When I started working at TeleAtlas Germany (former Robert Bosch Data; forever a part of TomTom now) in 2005 we still had production processes on the MapEngine technology coming from Etak. We had in-house python bindings that allowed for very productive development. It is fun to see this mentioned here today.

ugur2nd 3y ago

I'm interested in this kind of thing. How things work and so on, the mechanisms and algorithms behind it. The article is long and I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I upvoted it to read it later. That way it's easy to access.

ZFH 3y ago

How timely! I was watching a video about the ill fated Vector W8 supercar last night, and wondered about that awesome CRT proto-GPS thing seen in some shots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs

Solvency 3y ago
[flagged]
netsharc 3y ago
Terribly written article (there's no flow to the writing, the author seemed to have just listed bullet points off a PowerPoint notes section), and a blurry video with cringy narration. To complete it, here's an HD video tour of the Vector W8's screens: https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 , presented by a slightly annoying YouTuber.

bsenftner 3y ago

My first job after undergrad ('88) was creating a Mac-like GUI for Etak for a vehicle tracking company in Los Angeles. GUIs were still new, DOS was still king, I had experience working on the Mac OS as a beta OS developer, and I'd been working in a 3D graphics research lab (yeah, 3D graphics was research back then), and this company named TeleTrak needed a real time updating map. So I made the GUI for their mapping application, using my knowledge from writing early Mac GUIs, 2D video games and early 3D graphics. Etak was literally Alienware, in it's data structures and extremely efficient processing. Where I'd been expecting significantly slower performance, I'd made a foundation expecting to use various tricks used to the game industry to make it appear like things were happening while loads occurred and so on. None of that was necessary, as Etak was the fastest aspect of the entire software bundle. A single 386 PC with a some type of memory expansion so each had an additional 1MB of RAM above the ordinary 640KB would run the software, and the software was capable of real time tracking above 30fps around 20 vehicles. If tracking a single vehicle, the mapping was fluid with at-the-time incredibly sexy real time 30fps rotations of the map as the vehicle turned corners. While working there, PacTel bought the company. Renamed PacTel TeleTrak, the company suddenly had tours from US and Israeli military brass, so I quit.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage? Your programming is constantly focused, not on the limitations this imposes, but on the opportunities opened up by this vast blank canvas like never before. Imagine what it would be like if programmers still got as much user-utility per user-kilobyte as they did when that's all they had. Back in 1982 with the mass-production of Ataris I thought it would be good to have a cartridge for each city which had the map data plus the visual landmarks. Like a 3-D driving simulator but using real maps. Which could be played as a racing game, I guess something like GTA. And with further development would provide a framework for on-board navigation using a battery-powered computer. Just one of the many things you never expect early-adopters with more resources to not already be doing.
- bsenftner 3y ago

flir 3y ago

Reminds me a little of Sir Clive Sinclair's early products - someone who could see what gadgets the future wanted, but didn't quite have the technology to create them (eg the portable "flat-screen" TV with the side-mounted electron gun).

noemit 3y ago

Nolan told me he invented this so it would be easier for him to go sailing.

NKosmatos 3y ago

Wow, this is a fantastic story. It would make a good documentary!

jhdias 3y ago

Also... 1981 https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091030/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091030/

barnabee 3y ago

Does anyone else wish they could configure modern sat nav apps to have a simplified map display/UI somewhat in that style?

atemerev 3y ago
Vector displays are fascinating. I am trying to emulate the UI occasionally.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

m3kw9 3y ago

The tape search is really fascinating

bambax 3y ago

Fascinating article. About this: > Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called ‘dead reckoning‘. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are. > To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a process to match the position given by the navigation sensors to a topologically correct electronic map. Whenever the vehicle turned you made the assumption that you’re driving on a road. At that point the location could be ‘snapped’ back to the road and the error from the sensors could be reset. This technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is still in use today. Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by blocking the signal between the pilot and the drone; and it's also possible to jam GPS signal. But a drone that would use some version of "augmented dead reckoning" with a (relatively basic) analysis of features on the ground (roads, rivers, train tracks) would be able to guide itself without external input and would be virtually unstoppable (short of destruction). Yet they don't seem to exist yet? Is this harder to do than it sounds?

jelkand 3y ago
That sounds like inertial navigation with nav fixes, which predates GPS. It certainly does exist.
brk 3y ago
>Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by blocking the signal >between the pilot and the drone; Curious which country you are in where you see this occurring.
- defrost 3y ago
  Singapore, Germany, the UK, USA, Australia, .. countries with airports that want domestic security, etc. https://www.trd.sg/ https://www.trd.sg/ https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/ https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/ etc. Once you start looking at GPS spoofing, etc. it gets quasi-military, non-commercial, requires credentiuals | LEO contacts, ways to work around checks and balances: https://www.regulus.com/ https://www.regulus.com/ is Israeli miltech, other companies in other countries are similar.

hasoleju 3y ago

Now I know why the cursor from the old asteroids game looks like the position indicator in my car navigation. Great fun fact! The Atari Team which created the game was located next to the company that built the first navigation device.

gizmo 3y ago

One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too unreliable, too complicated. I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But ultimately the products didn't deliver on the vision. It wasn't until the iPod and capacitive touch screens and tiny hard drives came to the market that the iPhone became possible. Being 20 years early doesn't help. Similar catastrophically flawed research projects get started today. In the past couple of days the Humane AI pin has been in the news. It's a wearable AI gadget that seems cool but it doesn't work. The tech has to catch up to the vision. It's at least a decade ahead of its time.

amadeoeoeo 3y ago
Isn't this a necessary part on the innovation path?
- gizmo 3y ago
  When smart people work on hard problems this usually comes with positive externalities. Even when the tech ends up worthless the the engineers will have learned a ton. I don't think that having people work on technology that is ahead of its time is bad for society. I think it's effectively high budget university research that presents itself as a commercial endeavor. How much does silicon valley invest into these doomed sci-fi projects annually? Many hundreds of millions at least. I suspect PhDs at a university could produce a lot more innovation at a fraction of the cost.
- mavhc 3y ago
  Given that the tech and people went on to be involved in future nav systems, yes. I imagine all that work digitising the maps was used again and again for a few decades, and the people brought their hard won knowledge to newer systems
empath-nirvana 3y ago
This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important, because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology, tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they did, when they sold the company through the chain of acquisitions that ended up with them at TomTom and with TomTom in control of their patent portfolio.

cpr 3y ago

And, of course, the Asteroids Atari game sure looks like a version of the original Star Wars game on the PDP-1 from MIT I used to play in the Harvard grad computing center...

flyinghamster 3y ago
There actually was a cabinet called "Space Wars" that was a coin-op implementation of Spacewar. https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars

mempko 3y ago

Around the same time as Etak was Navteq. Navteq didn't build an in-car navigation system, but did build accurate map and the ability to provide turn by turn directions. Etak could not provide directions and just showed a map. Navteq had kiosks around SF where you could get a printed map with directions. Navteq eventually created the map used by all in-car navigation systems. It turns out great ideas happen around the same time. Computers became powerful enough that map digitization became possible. The confluence of technologies (all government funded, fyi) like computers, digital maps, and GPS, allows us to have a little square computer in our pockets that can tell us where we are in the world and how to get to where we want to go.

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Wasn’t there something from Honda with transparent film analog maps?

jacobcoro 3y ago

Halt and catch fire vibes. Wonderful story

Archelaos 3y ago

Here is a video worth watching about a similar project at Siemens in Munich from 1973, 12 years earlier (voice in German, English auto-translated subtitles available): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6BcwCMumo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6BcwCMumo

jagged-chisel 3y ago

> By today’s standards it was also supremely difficult and tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how to get there. If by "today's standards" you mean "ask a computer and it just does it for you," then sure. But this is by no means difficult and involves the most minor tedium. Want to get from Nashville to Charleston? Grab a US atlas, hold your straight edge to connect the two cities. Find the highways that connect the two close to the straight line. Signage abounds along the way. If you know Charleston, SC is generally east and a bit south, you can likely follow signage mostly without the map. Maybe you need a Nashville-level street map to get to the highway, and maybe one for Charleston to find your hotel. But tedious? Not especially. Without signs, and needing to measure each leg? Or asking locals along the way? Now that's tedious.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

Somewhat off topic. What do big military submarines use these days to navigate? Do they have nav systems based on topographic data of the sea floor? (I dont know if it is mapped to the degree its possible). Could that be read accurately with only passiv sensors? I think you could read it perfectly with sonar whatever that may have evolved into these days. I guess they could reach depth where they can poke an extraordinarily long antenna to the surface and talk to GPS systems? (I dont know if such an antenna exists but it would make sense)

Razengan 3y ago
Cthulhu guides the navigators via dreams.
ses1984 3y ago
I guess they don't need to map the whole sea floor, just enough landmarks.
- ThinkBeat 3y ago
  The more the better I would assume. I would guess some areas are boringly flat and easy, while other regions are full of obstacles and problems. I have read, but I cannot verify that the South China Sea is filled with obstacles and trouble, some they alleged China has created by sinking ships / crates / Supposedly to make it more difficult to navigate by submarine.
  - ses1984 3y ago
    Big military subs are platforms for icbms. They don’t need to be in the South China Sea. They don’t need to be anywhere. They just need to be hidden.
wbl 3y ago
Inertial navigation complemented with occasional GPS fixes.

Daub 3y ago

Time to plug my dear father's book 'The Principles of Arab Navigation'. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28/dp/B01FELBIPU https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28...

OJFord 3y ago

Quite incredible that so much of the innovation (perfectly recognisable and fundamentally still the same today) came in a single product. Alright fine 'six tapes to cover the San Francisco bay area' is not so recognisable, and pretty funny, but otherwise!

jefurii 3y ago

I'd love to see a modern system that had all the niceties like GPS, music, bluetooth but with an evolved multi-function display (MFD) with keypad entry. Touchscreens in cars are a terrible idea.

fudged71 3y ago

This feels remarkably similar to the Humane Pin

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Completely ahead of its time. Navigation without GPS is unthinkable today...