A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
maphappenings.com
maphappenings.com
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.
Felt the article was heavy on ad copy and graphics.
Navigation methods aside, those aren't mutually exclusive.
Honestly, this sounds like some crap spread by people who can't bring themselves to believe that non-Western "primitive people" could have highly developed skills.
The system of navigation was recorded orally. People in living memory retained the knowledge. Anthropologists got it from them, built replica canoes, and then sailed around discovering that it worked. Captain Cook used Polynesian navigator who was well traveled.
Maybe the rafts are coming from Easter Island losing the technology and using rafts instead.
I can sort of see that in a mind's eye, with rings of waves spreading as they bounce off obstacles in water. But that's bird's view of a miniature -- and seeing that from the surface would be a very different story.
It’s amazing they can read such nuance.
> 1. A natural or inherent impulse or behaviour.
> 2. An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought.
The man steered the boat with one had in the water, until he announced we were near a shoal of mackerel - he said he could feel the grease of their bodies in the sea water.
We threw some lines in and sure enough we caught plenty of fish for dinner.
They could see from the patterns in the waves, thousands of miles away, where the land masses were.
>insert joke about training neural networks
(If anyone knows the original quotes, please post below.)
"A depth of only 25 fathoms is quite enough to give some surface indications: coloration, wave phenomena, perhaps fauna. Is this the explanation of the ghost island? Some lost traveller, perhaps en route from Yap to Guam, seeing and remembering these phenomena, later reifying them as an inhabited land? Or is it possible that a real island once existed here, as the Carolinians say? [...] Any Carolinian navigator worthy of the name can give a whole set of radiating courses under all the navigation stars from every island of the Carolines, not just from Kaafiror. [... N]avigators do learn them, together with the courses from real islands, and they make no distinction among them. It is perhaps not altogether in the realm of fantasy to speculate that the curriculum of the schools of navigation was established in a time when Kaafifor was more than a discolored patch of water."
[1] https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_island...
The boundary between "imagining" and "visualizing" is somewhere between these two experiences but conceptually they are not that different.
I'm not sure how the concept of tracking virtual islands over the horizon really helps. The only thing I can think of is maybe the idea of it encourages the navigator to stay focused on estimating the passage of proxy points on the far horizon based on whatever composite of wind, current and swell signs they are intuiting from. While still quite variable, I assume gauging distance estimates on the far horizon is better than the alternative of trying to estimate distance traveled from the immediate surroundings of the craft (which are only useful for estimating velocity).
You can practice navagating against physical islands over the horizon, and when you're good at that, you've mostly gotten good at dead reckoning against a real reference point; of course, with corrections from the islands influence. Having a community shared archipelego of virtual islands lets you focus your dead reckoning skills on a point while offering a vocabulary of distance and reducing travel times between waypoints.
Go 1000 miles in this direction seems a lot harder for me to follow over many days than go X miles to A, then Y miles to B, then Z miles to C. Even if A and B aren't real. If I treat them as very small islands that will be over the horizon, no big deal that they don't influence the environment, they're small; but I can't really use them to course correct, my reckoning needs to be good.
That is with experience you can select something on the ocean far away that you can track (kelp, etc), with experience and focus to accurately track it and take into account its own movement. Then the method is obviously only promoted by those who successfully survived using it, as the potential nay-sayers who used it and failed are no longer there to give a counter-point. Finally, those who did not use it successfully are probably characterized as "not good navigators", in circular logic.
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.
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.
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
This is why people were mad at the "email, but on a cell phone!" patents and all of the "doing thing companies were already doing, but with internet!" patents from entities that don't make a product so they don't have to deal with real world limitations. Once the actual manufacturers start working on the problem they discover all of the obvious solutions locked behind patent walls.
I don't believe businesses deserve protection from competition. Not even when they've done meaningful original research. Society wins when people with the ability to bring a better product to market are legally allowed to do so.
Patents exist to reward research or invention that results in practicable ideas. Entrepreneurialism is not (and should not be) part of that.
What does the patent even do- protect the rights of the most successful company? At what point does it get taken away from the company that couldn't make enough (what's the dollar threshold?) and to which company is it given (or do they all just use it at once, and then the most successful is awarded the patent, and the rest have to pay arbitrary licensing fees to the winner?)?
The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/60130710.html?did...
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/...
I suspect there are even earlier examples.
Still impressive to get it into a consumer-sized (and almost consumer-priced) box.
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.
Edit: Funnily enough, searching on google for this paper, your comment is the second result.
(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.)
But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the future would be interested in the home video they were making?
Look for clips of "Star Wars" in action.
The 70's was anni interesting time. Atari was employing dynamic vector displays capable of real time motion.
Tektronix was using vectors with their storage CRT tech. Basically the vectors got painted onto the tube phosphors, thus displaying the image without the need to refresh.
4k resolution (vector coordinate space) ended up being a thing!
> 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.
I'd think that it's everyone else at Apple who's slinging code with the best of them.
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.
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.
You seem to be responding to another comment? Or are putting words in the commenters’ mouth?
Specific examples from the documentary were Star Wars and Alien. The latter of which included Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter) and H.R. Giger (effects+concept artist), reprising their roles as staff on Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Highly recommend the documentary by the way. I actually just saw it a couple weeks ago, so the comparison made a lot of sense to me.
Edit to add: I’d still unquestionably put Star Wars as the one that “set up an entire field for success”. Not just because it was the one that shipped and was a massive hit, but because it synthesised many elements besides Dune. I’ll watch that documentary with an open mind though.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage?
We've exceeded on multiple fronts what I thought I'd see in my lifetime. I can't imagine what people entering the field will see if they stay in the career. I started coding in '76, professionally in '82. My first deployment hardware had 3.5K, and today it's just ridiculous the resources on has, and exponentially so if one can still drop in assembly when needed. :)
"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-fr...
(no map, but display and address to address with route finding)
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-sys...
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
Only got that feeling back with Retina displays.
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)
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.
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?)
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.
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.
Interesting side-fact: we used time-of-flight with beepers placed in the cars and ordinary trigonometry to increase accuracy. Worked like a charm.
Anyway I really need such articles from time to time not to lose my faith in humanity.
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?
Curious which country you are in where you see this occurring.
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/ is Israeli miltech, other companies in other countries are similar.
Sure, that's not commercial .. but it's a Federal LEO with a tan shirt and shorts and a truck with "UAS Mitigation Systems" in the back.
https://www.faa.gov/airports/new_entrants/uas_detection_miti...
UAS mitigation or countermeasures include the capability to disrupt, disable, destroy, take control of, and/or provide alternate flight instructions to a UAS.
Some UAS detection systems may have countermeasure capabilities built-in, which can be disabled, while others may offer them as an optional modular capability.
FAA currently does not support the usage of C-UAS systems by any entity other than the federal departments (Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Energy) that have explicit statutory authority to use this technology.
Grey market availability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKHNVJfVIQg&t=480s
But I'm pretty sure this exists in most/all countries; DJI even sells equipment specially designed to listen to its own drones.
It exists, but isn’t advertised much as it’s essentially a military technology. If you read about the homegrown attack drones Ukraine is building they use a variation of this tech. Various US platforms do something similar. You won’t see this in a consumer drone anytime soon, but a skilled hobbyist could rig something together.
Civilian systems are usually not designed to work in a hostile environment, not only it is costly for a situation that is unlikely to happen in normal use, but authorities usually don't like it when such technology is available to the public. As a result, it tends to be classified. They want to be keep the advantage over enemies and criminals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Etak Navigator Tour and Demo [video] - 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 - Feb 2017 (83 comments)
i struggle to imagine how did the tape handle it.
> 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> also reports:
> TAPE DRIVE
> 5” x 2 3/4” x 3 3/4" 80 ips
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>
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...
"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.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28...
Alright fine 'six tapes to cover the San Francisco bay area' is not so recognisable, and pretty funny, but otherwise!
I'd pay for a CRT Waze skin and the option to turn off turn-by-turn 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.https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10276659...
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?
> None of the advantages of raster were applicable
Colour might have been nice though.
Perhaps one of the most widespread device that used a vector display was the original Asteroids arcade game.
There’s a functioning machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco (at least there was last time I went there), I can’t help but stare at it (and give a mini display history lesson to friends) every time I go. Those lines are just so crisp and bright and beautiful.
It also looks even cooler in person, as the refresh rate is also really good due to the CRTs, if there's an old arcade close with Asteroids or similar early vector games I'd really recommend going to see it.
The Atari Team which created the game was located next to the company that built the first navigation device.
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?
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. .