Collaborate Disseminate
Back in the old days, finding out your location on Earth was a pretty involved endeavor. You had to look at stars, use fancy gimballed equipment to track your motion, …read more Continue reading Fancy Gyroscopes Are Key To Radio-Free Navigation
Many of us have been asking for some time now “where are our robot servants?” We were promised this dream life of leisure and luxury, but we’re still waiting. Modern …read more Continue reading This is the Future of Waste Management
Many of us now carry a phone that can give us detailed directions from where we are to a destination of our choosing. This luxury became commonplace over the last decade plus, replacing the pen-and-paper solution of consulting a map to plan a trip and writing down steps along the …read more
Continue reading Turn By Turn Driving Directions From A Turntable
Our recent “Retrotechtacular” feature on an early 1970s dead-reckoning car navigation system stirred a memory of another pre-GPS solution for the question that had vexed the motoring public on road trips into unfamiliar areas for decades: “Where the heck are we?” In an age when the tattered remains of long-outdated paper roadmaps were often the best navigational aid a driver had, the dream of an in-dash scrolling map seemed like something Q would build for James Bond to destroy.
And yet, in the mid-1980s, just such a device was designed and made available to the public. Dubbed Etak, the system …read more
Continue reading How Etak Paved the Way to Personal Navigation
Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns, and the far too frequent stops at dingy gas stations for the humiliation of asking for directions. It took forever sometimes, and though we got where we were going, it always seemed like there had to be a better way.
Indeed there was, but instead of waiting for the future and a constellation of satellites to guide the way, some clever folks in the early 1970s had …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Car Navigation Like It’s 1971