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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
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Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#22What happened to the original units? Are there any left?
I have several of the gyro and inclinometer units, and the magnetometer compass, somewhere. The gyro was a motor spinning a flexible metal plate. As the vehicle moved, the plate would flex, and sensing the plate's position gave a rough turn rate. The inclinometer was a little sealed cup with four capacitive sensing plates. I was looking into using this for a robotics application, but it was too big for an R/C car sized vehicle.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#23Stan Honey other claim to fame (other than being literally the best yacht navigator, probably ever) was founding Sportsvision, the company that created the yellow 1st down line you see when you watch football on tv.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#24Back in the day the first “computer graphics” class we had at uni was on a tektronix 4010. You would build 3D models and rotate them and display the movement on the monitor. This was when all screens were green text only in a time share system.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#251991 home video demo of an Etak, in a custom housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s (Bet they didn't think at the time that techies of the future would be watching it in 2024 on the ubiquitous global data network.)
We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use to identify the era.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#261991 home video demo of an Etak, in a custom housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s (Bet they didn't think at the time that techies of the future would be watching it in 2024 on the ubiquitous global data network.)
We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use to identify the era.
Yeah, I was thinking the people who were showing this advanced tech thing were also likely the ones who could extrapolate where online was going.
But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the future would be interested in the home video they were making?
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#27Fantastic story.
> When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni.
What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#28>Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced iPhone in 2007.
Interestingly, one of Etak co-founders was Nolan Bushnell, and he was Atari co-founder that hired Steve Jobs (or specifically Allan Alcorn) in his only full-time job prior to Apple, pardon the pun.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#29What is the style of UI used in that device and why did it have that characteristic angular look? I’ve seen it on other devices of the same vintage.
The style is an artifact/limitation of using a vector display. Compare to today’s ubiquity of a raster display. Why did they choose to use a vector display? Maybe to decrease cost and avoid placing framebuffer memory? Maybe rendering maps directly to a vector display could be faster by skipping a rasterization process? Any other reason?
Maps are intrinsically vector data, and a raster graphics display back then would have been low-res, 320x240 at most, making the map (and text!) really difficult to read. And then you’d need the rasterizer itself, using precious CPU cycles and memory bandwidth to turn perfect mathematical line segments into crude pixelated approximations. And yes, the memory needed for the framebuffer was also likely an issue. The question is more, why would they ever have used a raster monitor? None of the advantages of raster were applicable, and the disadvantages were all relevant in their use case. The 100% obvious choice was vector.
Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
#30> 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.
No way did they invent this. Not even close!
This is called map matching. It predates Etak by at least 20 years, if not more.
This paper was published a decade before which does exactly this: Lezniak TW, Lewis RW, Mcmillen RA. A dead reckoning/map correlation system for automatic vehicle tracking. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. 1977 Feb;26(1):47-60.
The government was building out this technology in the 50s, here's a RAND report about that. https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/...
I suspect there are even earlier examples.