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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

maphappenings.com

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Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#61

Post by sbierwagen »

saulpw wrote: post #49
delichon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was 1995. In 1991, we had the ubiquitous intercontinental phone network, but overseas connections were >$1/minute and data rate was only 9600 baud.

Stretching the definition a little, satellite TV had been a thing for years by then. Neiman Marcus was selling satellite dishes in 1979.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#62

Post by incorrecthorse »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #47

The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.

Most modern navigation apps continue working in tunnels and other places without GPS. It's more like GPS augmented with dead reckoning.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#64

Post by m463 »

I had a friend who had one of these in the mid-90's. It was pretty cool (at the time)

I remember installation wasn't trivial. It needed a lot of futzing with the car. I remember the wheel rotation sensors, and they are briefly mentioned in the article.

Smazing that nowadays all this stuff is solid state and in your pocket.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#66

Post by masfuerte »

guenthert wrote: post #55
Sharlin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

All true. > None of the advantages of raster were applicable Colour might have been nice though.

Atari's Star Wars had a colour vector display two years before the Etak was released.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#67

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #47

The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.

GPS and other signals aren't continuous, they all use dead reckoning to fill in the blanks in between. This was even more of a necessity with early smartphones and navigation systems that only had GPS; nowadays they can use a combination of GPS, GSS, Gallileo, GPS and wifi networks. The latter was a secondary goal of the Google Street View project, matching GPS / location with wifi signals.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#68

Post by xixixao »

jandrese wrote: post #15

It is amazing that they got it to work as well as it did given how it was 15-20 years ahead of its time. Sure the unit ended up costing as much as the car it was mounted in, but given the limitations of the technology of the time that is simply amazing. To get an idea of how ahead of its time this is, it wouldn't be until a year after the release that High Sierra formatting for CD-ROMs would be proposed. A CD Drive w…

It was $4000 in today’s dollars, unlikely that it would have been installed in such a cheap car (1985 car prices[0]).

Interesting that it cost about as much as the Apple Vision Pro. Probably had way more utility for its buyers.

[0] https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile...

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#69

Post by fs111 »

When I started working at TeleAtlas Germany (former Robert Bosch Data; forever a part of TomTom now) in 2005 we still had production processes on the MapEngine technology coming from Etak. We had in-house python bindings that allowed for very productive development. It is fun to see this mentioned here today.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#70

Post by 10729287 »

madcoderme wrote: post #56
neilv wrote: post #19

1991 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.)

Your last line immediately made me think. probably in near future, techies of the future would say something similar about our achievements, maybe gpt, or 4 qbit quantum computer.

...and enjoy such a cute and naive retro technology. "Ah ! Good old times".
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