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posted by martyb on Sunday August 05 2018, @07:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the ingenuity++ dept.

Standalone navigation devices are a dying breed. These days vehicles tend to have navigators plumbed into their dashboards, and as long as there's a smartphone to hand... well, there's an app for that. Demand for the devices nosedived years ago, but the technology underpinning them is alive and well, floating out there in space. What we all know as GPS wasn't operational until the mid '90s, though this was predated by Transit, the first satellite-based geolocation network completed in the '60s. But the first automated in-car navigation system was developed long before we had the technology to put anything into space.

The concept of the modern navigator can be traced back to the early 1930s and the creation of the Iter-Auto. Manufactured by an Italian company based in Rome, the contraption was designed to be mounted to your car's dashboard and loaded with routes printed on long paper scrolls. It was hooked up to the vehicle's speedometer, and so the scroll would wind automatically in proportion with distance travelled. The maps themselves also included alerts of upcoming road features, like bridges and level crossings, as well as garages, hotels and such -- much like their digital equivalents today.

Source: Engadget


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:53AM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:53AM (#717462) Journal

    As an experienced over the road driver, I say that keeping a map up-to-date probably isn't worth more than a few cents. A dollar a year is the most I would pay for updates. Sure, you *can* run into problems with an out of date map. But, seriously, it takes two or three years to make any major change to the infrastructure. It takes a decade for those changes to add up to really meaningful changes to your routing.

    Yeah, if you're trying to save the last second in your routing, then, maybe you need the very latest up-to-date mapping, plus some kind of an app giving you road conditions, speed traps, and even which donut shop is having a special today. (mmmmmm - baker's dozen Bavarian Cream donuts for five bucks - gotta stop!)

    I strongly suspect that if I could find my 20 year old CD with Rand McNally maps on it, I could navigate quite well. The most likely problems would be trying to find new sub-divisions. Mary Beth's cul de sac won't be on the maps, nor Tom's Dead End Drive. But, if I know to look for Tom, I can probably call him and get directions off of Farm to Market road 1462, which has been there since about 1860. Places that haven't been built up in recent years will look just like they did fifty years ago - only the names of the stores and the names on the mail boxes will look any different.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:40PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:40PM (#717535)

    My guess is demographic games going on where people able to afford new cars likely afford new subdivisions so all cars on the road are designed under "new subdivision" criteria where it would be unthinkable not to have a 3 year old subdivision on your map because thats where people who buy new cars live.

    Kinda like the gaslighting for poor urbanites to become car-free hipsters, I'm sure their maps don't need updating when the last time their neighborhood was gentrified was 1955, but those people are too poor to buy new cars, so although they wouldn't need updated maps, they don't matter in the new car marketplace, what matters is the 'burbs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @12:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @12:03AM (#717672)

      Wait, what? Did you just call Runaway1956 a hipster?