First Map-Based Car Navigation System Debuted 14 Years Before GPS | Hacker News Reader

First Map-Based Car Navigation System Debuted 14 Years Before GPS

theinstitute.ieee.org

68 pointssohkamyung10 comments

This is way older than GPS -- similar systems were out in the 20s and 30s: http://99percentinvisible.org/article/analog-gps-scrolling-w...

Those maps look extremely similar to UK canal maps: http://www.macclesfieldcanal.org.uk/mcmap3.htm

These tended to be made into an almost straight line and printed on a single piece of paper with notable junctions and features only.

It would've been obvious at the time that the format would be ideal for fixed routes that these could be scrolled.

Something similar is often used for railway lines. Even Wikipedia has it on some pages, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eastern_Main_Line

The helium-gas rate gyroscope [1] is very strange. Honda's history says that it was built because it had only eight parts. It's a helium jet aimed at a pair of hot-wire anemometers. It wasn't a very good rate gyro, but it was cheap.

Etak had a rate gyro with a motor spinning a flexible metal disk, with the flexing sensed capacitively. I still have one of those somewhere. That was simple and cheap too, but still not very good. All these things had far more drift than even low end modern IC gyros.

[1] http://world.honda.com/history/challenge/1981navigationsyste...

Video of it in action: https://youtu.be/hOqig8rixOU

Not much later, and with its own completely different tech for auto navigation, came the Etak Navigator / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak. A good bit of SV history there.

There was recently a very good HN thread on Etak [1] including comments from people who've seen it firsthand or have worked on related ventures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825

Also the road embeded tracking wire in the 50s. New is old.

Another option: magnets every so many units of distance.

cool

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