Etak Navigator

I was working for a subsidiary of Magnavox in the early 1980s and we were producing and selling what we called the "AVLS" or Advanced Vehicle Locating System. Ours was also a dead reckoning system with a Magnavox SatNav/Loran C box keeping our locations as accurate as possible. This was the same system Magnavox sold for marine applications and it was amazingly accurate for the pre-GPS days. We would pester the USGS for their best maps and manually digitize them using AutoCad. The data was then loaded onto hellishly expensive Gridcase 8086 based machines (the old magnesium ones with the red plasma displays.) We could plot a moving vehicles position to within a few yards if we were correctly calibrated. Our accuracy was better just after a Sat fix and worst just before one, of course. The vehicle data was also passed back to a base station for display there (via packet radio or something like it - I wasn't too close to that part of the system.) Rather then create broad area maps and expect to sell this system to individuals we specifically marketed to agencies that could use the information to track their vehicles. A couple of Canadian cities loved the idea and bought it to improve their EMS service, tracking ambulance and paramedic locations real-time and dispatching based on actual response times rather then their theoretical response times from base positions. We also sold an installation to a police force in CT that I'll not mention. Those units "mysteriously" became very unreliable. Many of the antennas were gummed up daily (really - they'd stuff chewing gum wrappers in the antenna base to fubar the reception) and several of the units themselves fell apart (with the assistance of the butt end of a shotgun or two). Eventually the local Police union killed the deal, even after we put a "panic button" on the police radios that would alert the dispatcher with an exact lat/long for the officer's vehicle when it was pressed. We beat Etak to market by several years although we were in a vastly different market. Erik S. Klein www.vintage-computer.com -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-admin(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Rigney Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 12:38 PM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: RE: Etak Navigator Joe, Back in the mid-80's, Etak began shipping what I believe is the first commercially available in-vehicle navigation system. This system was the precursor to today's driver-guidance systems, and Etak's patents are probably in most if not all of them. The original Etak Navigator was a specially-packaged 286 system with 256MB RAM and 256MB ROM, and a four-track tape drive on which some of the "OS" and the digital maps were stored. The tapes didn't hold much, so for the San Francisco area, for example, you had four or five tapes--when you drove off the end of the map, you changed tapes to match your new location. The map moved as you drove, just like today's systems, but instead of the fancy color raster display, it had a green vector display. It had address geocoding (the ability to convert a street address to a lat/long point). It worked by using a compass mounted somewhere in the car (typically inside the headliner) and two wheel sensors on the rear wheels (which magnetic strips installed on the wheel rims themselves). The system worked by "dead reckoning" (actually "ded. reckoning" for "deduced"), which basically meant that you told it where you were when you first installed it, and then took it on a short calibration drive, and from then on, the system self-corrected and got increasingly better at following the map. No GPS at that time... that came much later, and obviously improved the accuracy and simplicity of the system. For those of you in the San Francisco area during the 70's and 80's, you could buy these at various auto-stereo places for around $3000-$3500 installed (does anyone remember Steven Matthew David, owner of Matthews TV and Stereo, top of the hill, Daly City! :-)) It was also used in emergency vehicles: coupled with a data radio, a central dispatch could watch a moving display of paramedic and fire vehicles driving around. Patrick [mailto:cctalk-admin@classiccmp.org]On drive? drive