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Comment by YouWhy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Do you mean David Lynch’s Dune? Jodorowsky’s attempt was in the 70s and was never released.

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.

> 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?

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.

My comment wasn't really about Etak at all, I just thought you might have mixed up Jodorowsky's Dune with Lynch's! The Lynch one seemed like a better fit, although I think "set up an entire field for subsequent success" is a bit of a stretch for both of them.

The documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” presents a fairly strong argument that the “Dune bible” that was assembled for that movie and shopped around to production studios strongly influenced many of the great sci-fi films (or at least iconic scenes in them) in the years to follow.

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.

Aha, thanks, that’s interesting! I knew some of that but wasn’t aware it had influenced Star Wars. That does make some sense.

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.

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