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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities.

The solution to that seems so obvious: make the phone speak to the driver instead. Was turn-by-turn navigation not feasible back then? Or what else am I missing?

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Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it.

Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.

Oh, even easier then; the phone would just have to read the address aloud. Symbian phones were able to run text-to-speech as far back as 2002; my best friend is blind and used a Nokia phone with a screen reader back then.

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again.

In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark."

Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

> In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark."

> Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

I heard these stories and would direct cabs the same way, until I realized that the cab drivers were right and I was wrong, and that the depictions of them as shady thieves who would purposely take you out of your way, or were horribly incompetent, were urban myths.

And I was being disrespectful to the drivers, to presume that and treat them that way. I don't treat other service industry people that way. And if you think about it, cab drives make more from a flag drop than a longer trip - as one cab driver said, 'people say these things to me - do you know how much I make for an extra few blocks? 50 cents? And what is my take of that?'

I learned to trust and respect the cab driver, who after all were human beings, and drove around all day long, and like most people was honest and considerate.

Being able to get to you and actually taking a good route are two different things though.

How did Cabbies know where to show up when called?

Or did they not? I only ever took Taxis from places I could flag them down pre-Uber.

Most taxi drivers required a license - and that required passing an exam. Big part of the exam was knowledge of town.

People also could tell the "main" roads, which would be known.

On a side note: my usual experience with taxis (not uber) is that they first ask the question to figure out if you know the town or not and then they know very well what is the longest route. Also even when asked for estimate of price it would always be the top.

Big reason why uber is so popular: you wont get a ling ride through whole town and you can rate the driver.

Calling a cab resulted in a cabbie showing up maybe 20% of the time. You would hail cabbies in the street.

At least some of the time this was more to stretch out a fare on the unsuspecting, rather than a total lack of local knowledge. Not that it makes it any better.

> Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it.

In what city? London cab drivers famously were (are?) required to pass a memorization test, but in American cities I've had many cab drivers who didn't know their way around. They've been generally better than Lyft/Uber drivers.

In just about every city a cab driver was expected to know where they were going. For more obscure addresses they may have asked for major cross streets or similar, but it was generally assumed that the driver knew where he was going (which led to the inevitable problem when he didn't or when the passenger was not precise in their description of the destination.) You would also always find a Thomas' guide somewhere in the front of the taxi just in case...

People knew this too - and so navigating by landmarks was much more common.

Some cities are setup so that with most addresses you can pinpoint almost exactly where it is in the city. Seattle’s a good example of this.

Also if you think of most taxi trips they will either be to a major location (hotel, airport, restaurant) or to a place personally known by the rider (house, work).

These feature phone did have Google Maps, and lists of GMaps directions, and could have done navigation just like the Garmin devices - but they crucially didn't have GPS.

Dispatch knowing drivers' locations in realtime would have made this a killer app imo. Car services used to assign pickups based on drivers reporting their location by radio.

This is me guessing: This sounds like before turn-by-turn navigation was possible. If they had to approximate location via a set list of cell ids, then that doesn't give very precise location data. Also, back then, I am guessing, there where not as good map data available, especially not that would fit in a phone. I would also think that this was before synthesised speech was really possible to do on a phone.

The world is a different place today.

Before smartphones and before cheap GPS, I got spoken turn-by-turn directions while driving from Tellme.

1-800-TELL-ME launched in 1999/2000. You told it your address and the destination address, and it read you the directions one at a time. E.g. after you made the first turn, you'd ask for the next one and it'd tell you. It did not need any GPS this way, it's like talking to someone sitting next to you reading the map for you.

Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007 for $800 million.

And did what with it?

And why?

To do the same thing Google was doing that year when they launched GOOG-411:

Using the interactive phone calls to train their speech recognition systems, so that they could eventually use what they learned to develop things like Google Assistant, Cortana, Windows Voice Recognition, etc.

Tellme was taking 2 billion calls a year when they were acquired. They had all the training data Microsoft could want to compete with Google in that area.

> In early 2012, Microsoft divested itself of Tellme Networks' interactive voice response (IVR) service and the majority of its employees to [24]7 Inc. The service was moved to a non-toll-free number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellme_Networks

GPS navigation is 90s tech, though. I had garmin barking turns at me in the early 2000s same as siri today. In fact usually better reception than my cell phone if it was a clear day, since cell coverage is still terrible where you really need need it out in the boonies where gas stations are miles and miles apart.

Devices like the Garmin [0] were chunky though, weren't they, like a few cm thick, even compared to phones of the times they were big. And to my [limited and shaky] recollection people had car mounted antennae for GPS (in the late 90s) because they worked poorly without it?

The first retro-fittable GPS was in 1997, the Alpine CVA-1005 [1], which weighed >3kg and had a display of 26cm across; it connects for nav to a CDROM drive containing base unit [2]; here's the wiring diagram [3].

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-c... [1] https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/ a good review of early GPS [2] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Alpine-NVA-N751A-Navigation-Syste... [3] https://elektrotanya.com/alpine_cva-1005_wiring_diagram.pdf/...

Chunky doesn't matter for a car GPS. They sit on your dash, not in your pocket. For my old garmens, the weighted sandbag mount they used to hold the device onto the dash was honestly less frustrating than a suction cup that falls of the windshield down to your feet while you a driving on the highway.

Oh, for sure, but surfsvammel was on about tech that fits in your pocket, you responded that GPS was 90s tech, and I was just fleshing out that whilst it was 90s tech it was only really widely available as tech for a car (and of course USA restricted GPS accuracy, which meant it often got confused in the UK as to which road one was on).

The last Garmin my dad had, maybe 5 years ago was decidedly chunky compared with phones at the time (but you need a reasonable sized screen and the use case meant it didn't need to be thinner, so perhaps not a fair comparison).

GPS nav hasn't improved much since the 90s, but smartphone nav relying on multiple positioning methods has improved remarkably in even the past 5-6 years. It used to be neither a dedicated GPS device nor a smartphone could handle dense urban areas (where buildings cause satellite interference) if you were moving much faster than a pedestrian.

True, but also your phone utilizes the same GPS signals. It's all about the maps. Your Garmin typically had maps for the whole country preloaded, your phone typically downloads them on the fly. So in the boonies your phone knows exactly where it is in terms of longitude and latitude, but hasn't a clue where anything else is.

It's not just about maps. Unlike a dedicated GPS device, your phone uses A-GPS for faster geolocation. Before A-GPS, you often need to wait a couple minutes before the device has any idea of its location or the time. Offline maps are available for both phones and non-phones, and aren't an issue at all.

Is everyone here too old to remember MapQuest or CD based car navigation systems? Apparently. We had decent turn by turn in the 90s. In the US mapping data was heavily derived mostly from public Census TIGER data, which had flaws but was good enough.

Just recently I had to explain how that thing works on an old car. In the end, my advice was to just slap an Android phone/tablet on the dashboard and forget the stupid CD satnav :D

They also had a backseat DVD player with (shudder) analog video input. The quality was atrocious!

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