Friday, January 10, 2025
I hope everyone in Southern California is doing okay. I recommend downloading the Breathable app, newly free, for monitoring air quality, and the Watch Duty app/website, always free, for monitoring current status of wildfires. (Unfortunately, I expect both of these will come in handy for me up here in the Bay Area, and given the realities of climate change, everyone reading this might want to bookmark them for future use).
If you aren't in the danger zone and want to help, you can donate here (or lots of other places):
California Wildfire Relief Fund
With that business out of the way, let's move on to lighter topics.
Item 1: a link
Soon after the iPhone took over the world, we all got used to mounting our phones in our cars so we could use Google Maps, Waze, etc., to guide us to our destinations. At some point it got easier, and now in many cars you can just plug your phone in and your navigation shows up on a bigger, built-in screen. You may also be aware that most cars also have built-in navigation that no one uses because it looks terrible, you have to pay extra for it, and you already have that perfectly good phone. Based on the demographics of my readership, you probably even remember using paper maps to get around - or their bastard child, the printed-out MapQuest page.
But long before smartphones, long before that crappy built-in navigation that nobody uses, and even long before Mapquest, somebody had to come up with idea in the first place and try to sell it as a standalone gizmo that cost over $4,000 in today's dollars:
That's the Etak Navigator, which I learned about from this Map Happenings blog post (written by James Killick, an engineer who worked on the Etak and a number of other notable mapping enterprises). The Etak was a digital automotive navigation system, created and sold back when Michael Jordan was a rookie.
As you might expect, the software and all mapping data ran off of cassette tapes.
Keep in mind, this isn't just a decade before cell service was widely available - this is before GPS was available. Seems like a big missing piece for a navigation system, doesn't it? Well:
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.
Augmented dead reckoning sounds great, but in a world without GPS you still needed a lot more stuff to figure out where you were:
There was an electronic compass installed on rear window of the vehicle.
To determine distance traveled and to augment the heading info from the compass, magnetic wheel sensors were installed on the un-driven wheels of the vehicle. This involved sticking special magnetic tape on the inside of the wheels and mounting magnetic sensors on the brake calipers.
Between all that finicky hardware and the use of the same medium I used to record "Ninja Rap" off the radio, this all sounds easy and probably not prone to malfunctioning all the time!
Somehow they managed to enable searching for addresses using twelve buttons mounted on the sides of the screen (which is the same kind of display used for oscilloscopes):
One funny little detail: the Etak Navigator didn't actually provide any directions. It just showed you where you were, and where your destination was. The journey between the two points was your problem. But even so, it must have seemed utterly insane in its time.
Anyway, it didn't quite take the world by storm, but they licensed the underlying technology and data to other companies (like Bosch) and it seems safe to say we now live in the world that Etak anticipated 40 long years ago.
There's lots more to this story – the Etak Navigator was made possible by overcoming an imposing number of technical and practical constraints – but I don't want to shamelessly rip off Map Happenings more than I already have. Check it out for yourself, and note that this is actually part 9 of an (eventually) 12 part series on notable map-related history.
Item 2: a list
McDonald’s Sweets & Treats, ranked:
- Hot Caramel Sundae
- Vanilla Cone
- McFlurry® with OREO® Cookies
- Baked Apple Pie
- Vanilla Shake
- Hot Fudge Sundae
- Chocolate Shake
- Strawberry Shake
- McFlurry® with M&M’S® Candies
- Chocolate Chip Cookie
Item 3: a media recommendation
VHS or Beta - Night on Fire
Item 4: word of the week
Hadal
The bone-white eldritch beast rose from the abyssal deep, reaching its glistening, taloned tentacles towards the cruise ship passengers. They cowered pointlessly, hoping against hope that a few thin sheets of steel might shield them from the hadal monstrosity's insatiable hunger.
Item 5: a photograph
See ya!
I don't know about you, but I'll definitely be looking into installing magnetic wheel sensors onto the un-driven wheels (?) of my vehicle.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
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