A Curious Phenomenon Referred to as ‘Etak’
Each from time to time, a revolutionary product comes alongside that modifications all the things. Or so stated Steve Jobs when he introduced iPhone in 2007.
However I’m speaking a couple of totally different revolutionary product. A foundational product that perpetually modified how everybody on this planet will get to the place they have to be.
At present, I’d wish to let you know concerning the Etak Navigator, a very revolutionary product and the world’s first sensible automobile navigation system.
Right here’s an image of it:
On the time, it was thought-about out-of-this-world. That is what Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury Information stated about it:
The Etak Navigator launched 39 years (!) in the past in 1985. 😱
Again then Reagan and Gorbachev have been negotiating the top of the chilly struggle.
And it was the 12 months Steven Spielberg launched the movie “Again to the Future”…
And I’m positive at the moment a lot of you have been however a twinkle in your mom’s eye…
Again in 1985 you used paper maps to navigate, like this one from a Thomas Brother’s map of Los Angeles:
As you may see, the maps weren’t all the time fairly. By right now’s requirements it was additionally supremely tough and tedious to search out areas and much more tough to work out easy methods to get there.
So, when the Etak Navigator launched, it was like one thing from the long run.
It instantly received tons of press, together with the entrance cowl of In style Science:
Almost all the things concerning the Etak Navigator needed to be conceived from scratch.
Most vital was the self contained positioning system. Keep in mind that again in 1985 GPS was not out there (see “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World: Half 8 — Oh Brother, The place Artwork Thou?“)
Earlier than GPS, navigation programs used a way referred to as ‘lifeless reckoning‘. Useless reckoning relied on sensors to find out distance traveled and path of journey. Nevertheless, no sensor is ideal. Consequently the additional you journey the larger the errors construct. Fairly shortly you haven’t any thought the place you might be.
To resolve this drawback Etak invented ‘augmented lifeless reckoning’. This used a course of to match the place given by the navigation sensors to a topologically right digital map. Each time the automobile turned you made the belief that you simply’re driving on a street. At that time the situation might be ‘snapped’ again to the street and the error from the sensors might be reset. This method was later adopted by all navigation apps and remains to be in use right now.
Like all makes an attempt at constructing a navigation system earlier than it, with out this key invention the Etak Navigator would have failed.
The second key invention was a ‘heading up’, transferring map show. This meant that the automobile remained on the heart of the display and the map moved and turned below the automobile. What you noticed forward of you within the windshield was what was displayed on the display. This proved extremely intuitive.
Third: the Etak Navigator was additionally the primary shopper machine to introduce the idea of tackle search, or what the geospatial trade has come to name ‘geocoding’.
Here’s a clip from the one video I may discover of the Etak Navigator in motion:
As you may see the map strikes and turns because the automobile drives.
The buttons on the suitable management the zoom stage which is denoted because the variety of miles between the automobile image and the highest of the display.
The highest of the display reveals the present zoom stage, the heading to the vacation spot, the variety of miles to the vacation spot because the crow flies, and which means is north.
The tackle search allowed entry of vacation spot by tackle, road or intersection. You might additionally retailer widespread areas like dwelling and work.
The Etak Navigator had twelve buttons, six on either side of the display.
These have been smooth programmed relying on the present operate.
Within the display beneath you may see how road names have been entered. Be aware how any letter or digit may simply be entered with simply two button pushes. Additionally, you solely needed to enter the primary few letters of a road identify:
And after that you just chosen the road from an inventory:
That is the Etak Navigator in navigation mode:
Be aware that the Etak Navigator didn’t present turn-by-turn instructions. As an alternative you merely zoomed out the map to see your vacation spot, proven as a flashing star. As you bought nearer to the vacation spot you zoomed in revealing extra of the native roads. You had to make use of your individual noggin to find out essentially the most acceptable street to take.
The shortage of turn-by-turn navigation didn’t show to be a difficulty. I do know from a lot private expertise that the system labored very properly!
Etak Navigator System Particulars
There have been 5 key elements to the Etak Navigator:
The primary was a vector CRT show — just like what you may discover in an oscilloscope.
The navigation app and information have been saved on cassette tape. The cassette tape drive was specifically developed to learn the tape at very excessive velocity. In a music participant a cassette tape is learn at about 5cm (1 and seven/8″) per second. The cassette tape in an Etak Navigator was learn at about 200cm (80″) per second!
There was an digital compass put in on rear window of the automobile.
To find out distance traveled and to reinforce the heading information from the compass, magnetic wheel sensors have been put in on the un-driven wheels of the automobile. This concerned sticking particular magnetic tape on the within of the wheels and mounting magnetic sensors on the brake calipers.
Lastly there was steel field concerning the measurement of a shoe field that contained the CPU and motherboard. This was put in within the trunk.
The cassette tapes saved each the navigation app and the map information. The maps have been referred to as “Etak Maps”. It took 6 tapes to cowl the San Francisco Bay Space:
The unique worth for the Etak Navigator was US$1,395:
That’s the equal of about US$4,000 right now.
On high of the price of the Navigator there was an costly set up price: it took an skilled technician about 4 hours to put in the entire system.
Simply Among the Technical Hurdles
Again in 1985 there have been big technical constraints.
GPS barely existed. In these days the federal government prevented anybody however the army getting greater than 100 meter accuracy. And GPS receivers have been each massive and costly.
As well as there have been no massive capability interchangeable media. Floppy disks couldn’t retailer sufficient data and CD-ROM expertise was model new and too pricey.
Crucial drawback to resolve was overcoming inertial navigation error from the wheel sensors and the compass.
Right here the answer was topological map matching.
This invention, above all others, made the product viable.
One other concern was information storage and latency.
The cassette tapes solely held 3.5 megabytes and had 10 second common search occasions.
The dev workforce needed to invent a means of storing the 2D map on a one dimensional medium, ensuring that areas shut by on the map have been additionally shut by on the tape.
Years later, when arduous drives turned cheaper and CD-ROMs turned extra available Etak’s extremely environment friendly map information storage algorithm paid off in spades and resulted in very excessive efficiency maps.
One other drawback was warmth.
Customers generally left tapes on their dashboards and clearly dashboards can get very, very popular.
You’ll be able to see from the exams that not all manufacturers of cassette tape did very properly:
Nevertheless, a model that labored was lastly discovered. It had a shell fabricated from polycarbonate.
Yet one more drawback was coping with inclines.
The map had no elevation data and so in the event you have been touring up or down a hill errors could be compounded within the system as the space traveled on the street was not equal to the space traveled on the map.
To compensate we subsequently wanted to know the slope of the hill. To compute this Etak’s lead {hardware} engineer invented a particular inclinometer that used fluid and a capacitive sensor. In exams on varied fluids he discovered that Tequila labored fairly properly!
One other drawback have been magnetic anomalies.
Bridges may be extremely magnetic and might actually throw off a compass.
The positioning algorithm subsequently needed to acknowledge these anomalies. When an anomaly was detected the positioning as an alternative relied on the totally different speeds of the wheels to find out modifications in path. It wasn’t fairly machine studying, however on the time it appeared fairly shut!
The system additionally needed to compensate for the magnetic fields generated by the rear window defroster.
In 1985 there wasn’t the luxurious of 25 billion transistors and an M3 chip.
As an alternative the system relied on an Intel 8088 CPU which had 8-bits, ran at 5MHz and solely had 29,000 transistors.
Thus each line of code needed to be extremely environment friendly. It was all written in C, aside from key components of the OS kernel which have been written in meeting.
What concerning the digital map?
Etak needed to create it — roughly from scratch.
Initially Etak thought it may get maps from the federal government. Again then the US Census Bureau had one thing referred to as GBF DIME recordsdata (which predated TIGER). However they have been stick maps and didn’t comprise any form to the roads.
Etak subsequently launched into a large program to construct a map of key metropolitan areas throughout the US and later in Europe.
To reposition the GBF/DIME recordsdata and provides them some form we used 1:24,000 scale United States Geological Survey quadrangle maps, in any other case knowns as ‘USGS quads’ as a reference.
Every map was photographed onto 10” transparencies after which scanned utilizing a really costly drum scanner.
Your complete map manufacturing program was developed and ran on a single VAX minicomputer. This blazing machine had 2MB RAM and two 400MB arduous drives. It price about US$120,000 in right now’s {dollars}.
This little satan was burdened with a mammoth set of duties. It supported:
- 4 map digitizing workstations
- The engineers creating and compiling code
- Batch jobs to course of and compile all of the map information
- The corporate admins who used it for phrase processing
This was the coding atmosphere:
A dumb monochrome terminal.
You edited code utilizing the ‘vi’ editor. Generally you waited an hour on your packages to compile.
The roles to course of the map information took as much as two weeks to run … which was longer the the imply time between failure for the VAX mini-computer. The engineers used to joke that they need to run the lengthy jobs solely instantly after a {hardware} failure had been mounted (figuring out full properly they have been uttering a statistical fallacy).
The map digitizing atmosphere was additionally revolutionary:
Every digitizing workstation was comprised of a PC clone with an 8-bit shade graphics card and a 19” monitor. Initially there have been 4 workstations which have been manned by three shifts a day. Later this grew to 36 workstations. Etak digitized maps 24 hours a day, 5 days every week and eight hours a day on weekends.
The map modifying system was the primary ever to make use of ‘heads up’ digitizing and was an enormous commerce secret on the time. It was so secret that the methodology was by no means patented and the digitizing atmosphere was walled off from prying eyes — particularly from the CEO of a selected firm referred to as ‘Environmental Programs Analysis Institute‘ — i.e. a gentleman referred to as Jack Dangermond who I’m positive would have leapt on the probability to borrow the idea. 😉
Earlier than this invention individuals used to digitize ‘blind’ utilizing digitizing tablets which was extremely inefficient and error inclined.
Etak’s map manufacturing system leveraged the eight bits of the colour graphics card very effectively. 5 bits have been used to show the scan of the USGS quad in greyscale and the opposite 3 bits have been used to show the digitized map on high. The system was used to reposition the GBF/DIME recordsdata in addition to to digitize new roads and edit street attributes like road names and addresses:
The Superb Staff Behind It
Etak was based in 1983 by a very superb engineer, Stan Honey.
Stan was already a world renown sailor. Extra importantly he was a world class navigator and had already crushed many crusing data throughout the Pacific by counting on his navigation expertise.
Earlier than founding Etak, Stan was a analysis engineer at SRI Worldwide in Menlo Park, California.
Stan has gone on to do many issues. His most up-to-date achievement was because the director of expertise for the America’s Cup crusing races the place he developed a system to trace the America’s Cup boats to inside 2cm, 5 occasions per second!
The unique thought for Etak got here when Stan Honey and a serial entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, have been on a crusing boat collectively. Nolan had employed Stan to navigate his racing yacht via the 1983 Transpacific Yacht Race, a prestigious crusing occasion that spanned 2,225 nautical miles of open ocean from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
Nolan was well-known for inventing the primary online game, Pong, and later for founding Atari.
The story is recounted by Benj Edwards in his improbable article for Quick Firm: “Who Wants GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Superb 1985 Automotive Navigation System“:
[Early one morning Stan and Nolan were on night watch together.] They started brainstorming a couple of computer-based navigation system to be used on land. Stan thought a navigation system for vehicles may function based mostly on lifeless reckoning and evaluating one’s present location to identified factors on a map, a way generally known as map matching. It wouldn’t want satellites in any respect, only a good digital map, an excellent compass, and a few sensors. Then it may show the consequence on an digital display.
Nolan response: “Yeah, let’s do this and I’ll fund it”
Nolan all the time had an appreciation for the place shopper expertise may ultimately go. In an interview for Inc. journal in 1984 he stated “Let’s say you’re in your automobile, and also you wish to go to dinner. You’ve received this field on the sprint. You punch in ‘Japanese,’ then ‘low-cost,’ then ‘good sushi.’ The field takes over and guides you to a spot.”
One in every of Etak’s key hires was Marv White. Marv was a map scientist and mathematician and labored on the US Census Bureau on their mapping program.
Underneath Marv’s path Etak’s map digitizing productiveness was thrice the trade normal. Since leaving Etak, Marv has gone on to many thrilling ventures, together with a interval as Chief Technologist for Innovation at ESPN.
There have been many different supremely proficient engineers behind the Navigator, a lot of whom beforehand labored at SRI Worldwide: Ken Milnes, George Loughmiller and Alan Philips to call a number of.
Lots of the authentic hires at Etak went on to different mapping organizations, together with yours actually. After I labored on the Apple Maps workforce, 12 of my colleagues have been Etak alumni.
Terry O’Brien, Marv White, Walt Zavoli, Alan Philips, Jamie Buxton, Ken Milnes, Stan Honey, Gerry Russell
So What Occurred to Etak?
The Etak Navigator was about 20 years forward of its time. As a result of the price of the {hardware} and the costly set up course of constructing a sustainable enterprise proved to be very tough (sound acquainted?)
As an alternative Etak shortly pivoted. It licensed the navigation code to the largest automotive OEM {hardware} producers on the time: Robert Bosch in Germany, GM within the USA and Clarion in Japan. In flip these corporations developed their very own navigation programs and, a few years later, the idea of a ‘Private Navigation System’ from the likes of Blaupunkt, Garmin, Magellan, TomTom and plenty of others was born.
In the course of the course of doing enterprise Etak attracted the eye of a maybe an uncommon suitor: Rupert Murdoch’s Information Company. It was Information Corps’ John B. Evans that noticed the potential.
Like Nolan Bushnell, John was a supreme visionary. You’d usually discover him on the identical platforms as Intel’s Andy Grove, Invoice Gates and different expertise megastars. Albert Scardino and Matt Falloon recount the story in John’s obituary within the Guardian:
The defining deal of [John’s] profession got here within the mid-Nineteen Eighties. In 1985, Murdoch invested $350m in a bunch of journey publications and directories. With one hand, Evans took over the patron journal division of Murdoch’s US organisation, together with TV Information, Elle and one he himself invented, Vehicle. Along with his different hand, he launched a secret challenge in a suburban workplace constructing to develop part of the journey group, the Resort and Journey Index, into a brand new media product, codenamed Jaguar.
Within the days earlier than streaming video and enormous file capability on the web, travellers’ views of their accommodations and locations have been restricted to vacationer brochures. Jaguar allowed an digital visible tour of locations, full with views of the lodge room that they had booked. As soon as built-in with main airline reserving data and different databases and cross-referencing instruments, the system threatened to leapfrog different airline, automobile and lodge reservation programs.
It was thus that John had the imaginative and prescient to make use of Etak’s maps and expertise to learn the Jaguar system. Thus John satisfied Rupert to purchase Etak.
Stan Honey recounts the conversations:
John immediately noticed the facility of maps in media to vary the world of categorized advertisements, phone book, journey, and broadly reply the questions of “the place is the closest?” and “how do I get to it?”. Naturally, John and my shared crusing background created an prompt group of widespread buddies and expertise. I remained shut buddies with John till he handed away and visited him usually. Lengthy after John had left Information Corp, every time I used to be tee’d up in New York ready for a climate window for a Transatlantic document try below sail, I’d all the time invite John to come back go to the boat, which he discovered fascinating because the boats have been 100 foot monohulls or multihulls. I doubt that Etak would have ever appeared on Murdoch’s radar display with out John Evans’ imaginative and prescient and dedication to his imaginative and prescient, and to Etak. On the time of his choice to purchase Etak, Murdoch additionally requested Barry Diller, who was then operating Fox, for his opinion. Barry Diller was hard-nosed and direct in his questions, and had a barely shorter time period imaginative and prescient than did John, however Barry additionally supported Information Corp’s acquisition of Etak, and concentrate on the maps.
John actually was a long-term visionary, as was Nolan Bushnell. In the course of the Etak days, each would go to and “wind-up” the Etak crew with their predictions. That was very useful as the 2 of them stored our minds large open. However it was additionally useful that they might largely keep away as a result of we have been burdened with the necessity to really get issues to work, which visionaries seldom are. It’s fascinating to notice that the entire issues that Nolan and John predicted, have occurred. It’s also fascinating to recollect how far-fetched they appeared on the time of their visits.
However the occasions there are a changin’: as destiny would have it in 1989 Murdoch bought the Jaguar system to Reed Worldwide for a revenue of $500M. With Jaguar bought the relevance of Etak to New Corp lessened.
Information Corp subsequently bought Etak to SONY, who then later bought it to Tele Atlas. And nonetheless later Tele Atlas was subsumed by TomTom. So what was initially Etak is now TomTom:
However Why the identify ‘Etak’?
The reply goes again to the early days of Polynesian navigation. In these days the traditional mariners navigated the seas by counting on a sequence of environmental cues, such because the positions of islands round them.
They imagined that that their boats have been stationary and that the islands moved previous them.
In the identical means, within the Etak Navigator the automobile is stationary and it’s the maps that transfer previous the automobile…
With that in thoughts, Stan determined to name his firm Etak, which is a Polynesian time period for transferring navigational reference factors.
However Wait, There’s One Extra Factor…
If you take a look at any shopper mapping app in navigation mode, have you ever observed one thing?
Have you ever observed one thing concerning the image used to indicate automobile location?
Does it look acquainted? Properly, in fact it does …
So it seems the image utilized by all navigation apps right now is identical one initially invented by Etak.
However why did Etak use that individual image?
In the event you discuss to the engineer who wrote the unique code, George Loughmiller, he’ll be meek and let you know that it appeared like a good suggestion on the time. However you need to keep in mind one factor: Etak was incubated by Nolan Bushnell, founding father of Atari. And at the moment each Etak and Atari have been housed in the identical workplace constructing at 1287 Lawrence Station Street in Sunnyvale, California.
As a result of Etak used a vector show with restricted CPU, George wanted a logo that didn’t burden the very scarce computing assets. He additionally wanted a logo that was simple to learn. A standard image for a automobile — 🚗 — required too many strains. It additionally didn’t clearly connote path. One thing less complicated was wanted.
Legend has it that one in every of Etak’s engineers received to see a pre-release demo of one in every of Atari’s newest video games. And that sport was…
And what image did Asteroids use for his or her spaceship?
And thus the image for automobile navigation was born and remains to be utilized by all navigation apps globally right now:
So There You Have It…
Each from time to time, a revolutionary product comes alongside that modifications all the things.
Etak’s many important innovations included:
- the world’s first in-vehicle nav system that really labored
- augmented lifeless reckoning utilizing map matching
- transferring map heads up show
- first use of geocoding in a shopper utility
- algorithms for extremely environment friendly map information storage and retrieval
- heads up digitizing
- the world’s first excessive quantity digital map manufacturing system
- inventor of the common map navigation image
I used to be however a pimply engineer on the time. Little did I do know once I joined Etak in 1985 that I used to be going to be a part of such an illustrious workforce.
My hats off and greatest needs to everybody I labored with: it was a privilege, an honor and an incredible journey. Thanks.
Acknowledgements, Additional Studying & Watching
