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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:48PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:48PM (#717516)

    In the Goldfinger film, James Bond had a scroller map that looked like it was being projected from microfiche. That was around 1964 or so.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:36PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:36PM (#717534)

    In the Goldfinger film, James Bond had a scroller map that looked like it was being projected from microfiche

    I'm surprised "microfiche as a moving map" never went anywhere. It seems the logical choice. My guess is the optical path is too bulky and sensitive to vibration. Also we're talking tungsten wire filaments sensitive to vibration, LED would work today.

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:03PM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:03PM (#717562) Homepage

      But it did, hell, back when I was in the service F-15's still used Remote Map Readers (probably replaced with digital stuff now). They were by far one of the most finicky and damaged LRU's on the bird because of all the moving parts in them.