Here I am

April 15, 2024 9:48 PM

The Etak Navigator "Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system."[via]
posted by dhruva (27 comments total)

Asteroids had been out for years before Etak was founded in '83.
posted by torokunai at 10:09 PM on April 15 [4 favorites]

My dad got to test-drive one of these (he was a technology columnist)! I (age 10 or so) clearly remember thinking "I am never going to be able to tell anyone about this, nobody will believe a word of it".
posted by dmd at 10:45 PM on April 15 [11 favorites]

Lovely Pip-Boy vibes.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 11:25 PM on April 15 [8 favorites]

I don't see the Hyperspace button.
posted by pracowity at 11:26 PM on April 15 [3 favorites]

What a READ
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:29 PM on April 15

Asteroids had been out for years before Etak was founded in '83.
They were still developing versions for different platforms through the 1980s
posted by Lanark at 12:36 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

This is really lovely. Total enthusiast, great anecdotes.
posted by Joeruckus at 1:19 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]

As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are.
posted by chavenet at 2:18 AM on April 16 [4 favorites]

I love stories like this.
posted by limeonaire at 4:57 AM on April 16

That was an era of computing. Wow.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:23 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]

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."
posted by fairmettle at 6:02 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

Maybe I missed it, but how does it know your starting position? Did you have to enter that manually?

Great post.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 6:26 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]

Technically, this is fascinating. From a business perspective, it's surprising to me that this idea made the cut. The development costs were high but not crazy-high. The unit costs were really high for something so limited. I could maybe imagine it being worthwhile if you've got a business with a fleet of drivers crisscrossing a city.
posted by adamrice at 6:42 AM on April 16

Also, multiple tapes for the city of San Francisco. So I guess that as you cross the map boundary you eject one tape and insert another?
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 7:18 AM on April 16

This is blowing my mind. My first thought was "Wow, that's the same tech as those early vector video games!" and then I read:

The original idea for Etak came when Stan Honey and a serial entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, were on a sailing boat together... Nolan was famous for inventing the first video game, Pong, and later for founding Atari.

Amazing.
posted by gwint at 7:37 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

No such thing as (commercial) GPS, so they had to do all the map digitization themselves, by hand on a VAX 11/750 (presumably running VMS), which crashed a lot. In fact, it had an MTBF of less that two weeks, but the map data compilation took longer than two weeks to run so ....

The jobs to process the map data took up to two weeks to run … which was longer the the mean time between failure for the VAX mini-computer. The engineers used to joke that they should run the long jobs only immediately after a hardware failure had been fixed (knowing full well they were uttering a statistical fallacy).

I learned to code the big brother of this machine (the 11/780) on the same VT100s depicted. Story checks out.
posted by The Bellman at 8:00 AM on April 16 [4 favorites]

I spent two years in high school programming on 11/750s and an 11/785, and I was later an operator on an 11/785. Our MTBF was substantially longer than 2 weeks, they must've had a nasty hardware problem somewhere.
posted by wintermind at 9:01 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

The original idea for Etak came when Stan Honey and a serial entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, were on a sailing boat together

Weren't chartplotters just starting to appear around that time? A quick google doesn't seem to reveal anything about when the first one came on the market, but I think CRT-based chartplotters were a thing by the mid-1980s and these guys might have been wealthy enough to own one on a recreational sailboat.

It seems like GPS became available for civilian use around 1983. If the inspiration for Etak was to create a chartplotter for a car, I wonder if they ever toyed around with combining it with a LORAN-C receiver for positioning information. It might have worked if you were near the coast....
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:34 AM on April 16 [2 favorites]

Here's the (allegedly) first chart plotter from about 1985 ... bellissimo.
posted by credulous at 10:56 AM on April 16 [3 favorites]

Hell of a read. Thanks for this, dhruva.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 11:32 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]

I was going to write a bit about being surprised they didn't use LORAN, but looking it up, it looks like LORAN-C never got beyond 60ft accuracy and that is at best, with no interference from atmospheric or other interference (usually over water). So that makes this even more impressive, they managed to take a look at the most accurate positioning system in the world at the time and think "that's lousy, let's build something that actually can tell you which street you are on."
posted by Hactar at 11:40 AM on April 16 [2 favorites]

>Nolan was famous for inventing the first video game, Pong, and later for founding Atari.

"Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in June 1972. Five months later, Atari's first product, Pong, changed gaming forever."

I got to shake Nolan's hand at the 1989 AMOA show floor in Las Vegas. What a future I had then!
posted by torokunai at 3:01 PM on April 16

→ Our MTBF was substantially longer than 2 weeks, they must've had a nasty hardware problem somewhere.

Yeah: Unix. In the early-mid 80s, Unix was frequently described as a way of slowing down a VAX. Shoulda stuck with VMS for reliability.
posted by scruss at 4:09 PM on April 16

This report has descriptions of the UI, in discussing its modification for military use:

Army DTIC - Etak Navigator Modification Final Report - Oct. 1990 [PDF]

Etak modified its land vehicle navigation device, the Navigator, for test and evaluation by the U.S. Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories.

The Navigator is a low-cost off-the-shelf commercial device that exhibits accurate navigation along with a highly useful electronic map display.

The device uses a combination of dead reckoning and map matching. As par of this contract, Etak found that it could create the necessary maps from DMAA 1:50,000 scale source material, to an accuracy of 50 meters, and that the Navigator could input and display vehicle positions and waypoints in UTM coordinates. In almost 1400 km of drive testing in Fort Hood, Texas, the modified Navigator showed that as a dead-reckoning device It is accurate to 2% of distance traveled, while its map-matching algorithm gives the Navigator performance comparable to that of an absolute navigation device with an average error of 50 meters.

This navigation device demonstrates useful performance for certain classes of Army vehicles. Other vehicles may reqire more robust and hence more costly devices. It is suggested that digital map displays like that of the Navigator could be a useful standard presentation device for all Army vehicle navigation.

Maybe I missed it, but how does it know your starting position? Did you have to enter that manually?

Seems that way:

The Destination Options Screen (see Figure 4) contains a new button function to
allow using UTM coordinates to enter a destination. In addition, the coordinates
of the destination are displayed in UTM if the current destination was entered
from the UTM screen. Although the Reposition Vehicle Screen is not shown
separately in this report, it contains similar changes.

posted by snuffleupagus at 4:39 PM on April 16

the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system

As in, cars.

Dead reckoning using gyroscopic INS had been in ships and planes and spacecraft for decades. Including various kinds of analog and then hybrid or fully digital moving maps using INS and beacons.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:52 PM on April 16

Been lurking forever, just subscribed this year and way too busy to get deep on Metafilter. I know I should read how to properly join the metfilter community (I promise I will!), but I have to just throw a comment on this post.

When I was in high school my friend's dad worked for this company - I believe he was an engineer at Etak. The car my friend drove had this system in it and I actually got to use it. I remember how incredibly futuristic it was. My buddy's dad explained to us how it was installed - the hardware on the wheels and everything -- so wild. When my friend was driving I would sometimes have to push a button to manually adjust our location, if I remember right - I'm ancient, so I might not. At the time I delivered pizzas and was really impressed, but I used the Thomas Brothers Guide like a champion, so I was unimpressed by how many cassette tapes we needed to cover the Bay Area (I guess I should add I had an old Atari 400 with a cassette drive years before and I was 17, so I had no perspective whatsoever).

It's funny, I still kinda hate GPS navigation, and in some ways I like Etak's system better. Here's the map and where you are - figure out how to get there yourself.
posted by dfazman at 8:24 AM on April 18 [2 favorites]

Welcome aboard, dfazman.

Bringing your personal experience to the topic at hand is the best kind of MetaFiltering - - great first comment!
posted by fairmettle at 9:22 AM on April 29