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