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A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’
Map Happenings ^ | 11 April 2024 | Map Happenings

Posted on 04/16/2024 7:29:03 AM PDT by ShadowAce

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced iPhone in 2007.

But I’m talking about a different revolutionary product. A foundational product that forever changed how everyone on this planet gets to where they need to be.

Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system.

Here’s a picture of it:

The Etak Navigator

At the time, it was considered out-of-this-world. This is what Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News said about it:

Quote from the San Jose Mercury News on the Etak Navigator in 1985

The Etak Navigator launched 39 years (!) ago in 1985. 😱

Back then Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the end of the cold war.

Reagan and Gorbachev negotiating the end of the cold war

And it was the year Steven Spielberg released the film “Back to the Future”…

Back to the Future Movie: Credit: Steven Spielberg,  Robert Zemeckis and Universal Pictures
Credit: Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and Universal Pictures

And I’m sure at that time many of you were but a twinkle in your mother’s eye…

Back in 1985 you used paper maps to navigate, like this one from a Thomas Brother’s map of Los Angeles:

A Thomas Brother's Map

As you can see, the maps weren’t always pretty. By today’s standards it was also supremely difficult and tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how to get there.

So, when the Etak Navigator launched, it was like something from the future.

The Etak Navigator

It immediately got tons of press, including the front cover of Popular Science:

Popular Science article on the Etak Navigator

Nearly everything about the Etak Navigator had to be conceived from scratch.

Most important was the self contained positioning system. Remember that back in 1985 GPS was not available (see “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World: Part 8 — Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?“)

Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called ‘dead reckoning‘. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are.

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.

Like all attempts at building a navigation system before it, without this key invention the Etak Navigator would have failed.

The second key invention was a ‘heading up’, moving map display. This meant that the vehicle remained at the center of the screen and the map moved and turned under the vehicle. What you saw ahead of you in the windshield was what was displayed on the screen. This proved highly intuitive.

Third: the Etak Navigator was also the first consumer device to introduce the concept of address search, or what the geospatial industry has come to call ‘geocoding’.

Etak Navigator -- Key Features

Here is a clip from the only video I could find of the Etak Navigator in action: 

As you can see the map moves and turns as the vehicle drives. 

The buttons on the right control the zoom level which is denoted as the number of miles between the vehicle symbol and the top of the screen. 

The top of the screen shows the current zoom level, the heading to the destination, the number of miles to the destination as the crow flies, and which way is north.

The address search allowed entry of destination by address, street or intersection. You could also store common locations like home and work.

The Etak Navigator: finding an address

The Etak Navigator had twelve buttons, six on each side of the screen. 

These were soft programmed depending on the current function.

In the screen below you can see how street names were entered. Note how any letter or digit could easily be entered with just two button pushes. Also, you only had to enter the first few letters of a street name:

The Etak Navigator: finding an address

And after that you simply selected the street from a list:

The Etak Navigator: finding an address

This is the Etak Navigator in navigation mode:

The Etak Navigator: navigation mode

Note that the Etak Navigator did not provide turn-by-turn directions. Instead you simply zoomed out the map to see your destination, shown as a flashing star. As you got closer to the destination you zoomed in revealing more of the local roads. You had to use your own noggin to determine the most appropriate road to take.

The lack of turn-by-turn navigation did not prove to be an issue. I know from much personal experience that the system worked very well!

There were five key components to the Etak Navigator:

The Etak Navigator: system components

The first was a vector CRT display — similar to what you might find in an oscilloscope.

The navigation app and data were stored on cassette tape. The cassette tape drive was specially developed to read the tape at very high speed. In a music player a cassette tape is read at about 5cm (1 and 7/8″) per second. The cassette tape in an Etak Navigator was read at about 200cm (80″) per second!

There was an electronic compass installed on rear window of the vehicle.

To determine distance traveled and to augment the heading info from the compass, magnetic wheel sensors were installed on the un-driven wheels of the vehicle. This involved sticking special magnetic tape on the inside of the wheels and mounting magnetic sensors on the brake calipers.

Finally there was metal box about the size of a shoe box that contained the CPU and motherboard. This was installed in the trunk.

The cassette tapes stored both the navigation app and the map data. The maps were called “Etak Maps”. It took 6 tapes to cover the San Francisco Bay Area:

The Etak Navigator: Etak Maps

The original price for the Etak Navigator was US$1,395:

That’s the equivalent of about US$4,000 today.

On top of the cost of the Navigator there was an expensive installation cost: it took an experienced technician about 4 hours to install the whole system.

Back in 1985 there were huge technical constraints.

GPS barely existed. In those days the government prevented anyone but the military getting more than 100 meter accuracy. And GPS receivers were both large and expensive.

In addition there were no large capacity interchangeable media. Floppy disks couldn’t store enough information and CD-ROM technology was brand new and too costly. 

The most important problem to solve was overcoming inertial navigation error from the wheel sensors and the compass. 

Here the solution was topological map matching. 

This invention, above all others, made the product viable.

The Etak Navigator: augmented dead reckoning

Another issue was data storage and latency. 

The cassette tapes only held 3.5 megabytes and had 10 second average seek times.

The dev team had to invent a way of storing the 2D map on a one dimensional medium, making sure that regions close by on the map were also close by on the tape. 

Years later, when hard drives became cheaper and CD-ROMs became more readily available Etak’s highly efficient map data storage algorithm paid off in spades and resulted in very high performance maps.

The Etak Navigator: Etak Maps technology

Another problem was heat. 

Users commonly left tapes on their dashboards and obviously dashboards can get very, very hot.

You can see from the tests that not all brands of cassette tape did very well:

The Etak Navigator: finding the right cassette brand for Etak Maps

However, a brand that worked was finally found. It had a shell made of polycarbonate.

Yet another problem was dealing with inclines.

The map had no elevation information and so if you were traveling up or down a hill errors would be compounded in the system as the distance traveled on the road was not equal to the distance traveled on the map.

To compensate we therefore needed to know the slope of the hill. To compute this Etak’s lead hardware engineer invented a special inclinometer that used fluid and a capacitive sensor. In tests on various fluids he found that Tequila worked quite well!

The Etak Navigator: dealing with inclines

Another problem were magnetic anomalies. 

Bridges can be highly magnetic and can really throw off a compass. 

The positioning algorithm therefore had to recognize these anomalies. When an anomaly was detected the positioning instead relied on the different speeds of the wheels to determine changes in direction. It wasn’t quite machine learning, but at the time it seemed pretty close!

The system also had to compensate for the magnetic fields generated by the rear window defroster.

The Etak Navigator: dealing with magnetic anomolies

In 1985 there wasn’t the luxury of 25 billion transistors and an M3 chip.

Instead the system relied on an Intel 8088 CPU which had 8-bits, ran at 5MHz and only had 29,000 transistors. 

Thus every line of code had to be incredibly efficient. It was all written in C, except for key parts of the OS kernel which were written in assembly. 

The Etak Navigator: limited to an Intel 8088 CPU

What about the digital map?

Etak had to create it — more or less from scratch. 

Originally Etak thought it could get maps from the government. Back then the US Census Bureau had something called GBF DIME files (which predated TIGER). But they were stick maps and didn’t contain any shape to the roads. 

Etak therefore embarked on a massive program to build a map of key metropolitan areas across the US and later in Europe. 

The Etak Navigator: making the maps from scratch

To reposition the GBF/DIME files and give them some shape we used 1:24,000 scale United States Geological Survey quadrangle maps, otherwise knowns as ‘USGS quads’ as a reference. 

Each map was photographed onto 10” transparencies and then scanned using a very expensive drum scanner. 

The Etak Navigator: making maps from scratch

The entire map production program was developed and ran on a single VAX minicomputer. This blazing machine had 2MB RAM and two 400MB hard drives. It cost about US$120,000 in today’s dollars.

This little devil was burdened with a mammoth set of tasks. It supported:

The Etak Navigator: map production on a VAX mini-computer

This was the coding environment:

The Etak Navigator: environment for the dev team

A dumb monochrome terminal. 

You edited code using the ‘vi’ editor. Sometimes you waited an hour for your programs to compile. 

The jobs to process the map data took up to two weeks to run … which was longer the the mean time between failure for the VAX mini-computer. The engineers used to joke that they should run the long jobs only immediately after a hardware failure had been fixed (knowing full well they were uttering a statistical fallacy).

The map digitizing environment was also revolutionary:

The Etak Navigator: map digitizing environment

Each digitizing workstation was comprised of a PC clone with an 8-bit color graphics card and a 19” monitor. Initially there were four workstations which were manned by three shifts a day. Later this grew to 36 workstations. Etak digitized maps 24 hours a day, 5 days a week and 8 hours a day on weekends.

The map editing system was the first ever to use ‘heads up’ digitizing and was a huge trade secret at the time. It was so secret that the methodology was never patented and the digitizing environment was walled off from prying eyes — especially from the CEO of a particular company called ‘Environmental Systems Research Institute‘ — i.e. a gentleman called Jack Dangermond who I’m sure would have leapt at the chance to borrow the concept. 😉

Before this invention people used to digitize ‘blind’ using digitizing tablets which was highly inefficient and error prone.

Etak’s map production system leveraged the eight bits of the color graphics card very efficiently. 5 bits were used to display the scan of the USGS quad in greyscale and the other 3 bits were used to display the digitized map on top. The system was used to reposition the GBF/DIME files as well as to digitize new roads and edit road attributes like street names and addresses:

The Etak Navigator: heads up digitizing

Etak was founded in 1983 by a truly amazing engineer, Stan Honey.

Stan was already a world renown sailor. More importantly he was a world class navigator and had already beaten many sailing records across the Pacific by relying on his navigation skills. 

Before founding Etak, Stan was a research engineer at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. 

Stan has gone on to do many things. His most recent achievement was as the director of technology for the America’s Cup sailing races where he developed a system to track the America’s Cup boats to within 2cm, five times per second!

Etak's founder, Stan Honey

The original idea for Etak came when Stan Honey and a serial entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, were on a sailing boat together. Nolan had hired Stan to navigate his racing yacht through the 1983 Transpacific Yacht Race, a prestigious sailing event that spanned 2,225 nautical miles of open ocean from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

Nolan was famous for inventing the first video game, Pong, and later for founding Atari.

The Etak Navigator: Nolan Bushnell of Atari provided the 'angel' round

The story is recounted by Benj Edwards in his fantastic article for Fast Company: “Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System“:

Nolan always had an appreciation for where consumer technology might eventually go. In an interview for Inc. magazine in 1984 he said “Let’s say you’re in your car, and you want to go to dinner. You’ve got this box on the dash. You punch in ‘Japanese,’ then ‘cheap,’ then ‘good sushi.’ The box takes over and guides you to a place.”

One of Etak’s key hires was Marv White. Marv was a map scientist and mathematician and worked at the US Census Bureau on their mapping program. 

Under Marv’s direction Etak’s map digitizing productivity was three times the industry standard. Since leaving Etak, Marv has gone on to many exciting ventures, including a period as Chief Technologist for Innovation at ESPN.

The Etak Navigator: Marv White

There were many other supremely talented engineers behind the Navigator, many of whom previously worked at SRI International: Ken Milnes, George Loughmiller and Alan Philips to name a few.

Many of the original hires at Etak went on to other mapping organizations, including yours truly. When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni.

The Etak Navigator: founding teamEtak Staff in 1993:
Terry O’Brien, Marv White, Walt Zavoli, Alan Philips, Jamie Buxton, Ken Milnes, Stan Honey, Gerry Russell

The Etak Navigator was about 20 years ahead of its time. Due to the cost of the hardware and the expensive installation process building a sustainable business proved to be very difficult (sound familiar?)

Instead Etak quickly pivoted. It licensed the navigation code to the biggest automotive OEM hardware manufacturers at the time: Robert Bosch in Germany, GM in the USA and Clarion in Japan. In turn these companies developed their own navigation systems and, many years later, the concept of a ‘Personal Navigation Device’ from the likes of Blaupunkt, Garmin, Magellan, TomTom and many others was born.

During the course of doing business Etak attracted the attention of a perhaps an unusual suitor: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It was News Corps’ John B. Evans that saw the potential.

Like Nolan Bushnell, John was a supreme visionary. You would often find him on the same platforms as Intel’s Andy Grove, Bill Gates and other technology megastars. Albert Scardino and Matt Falloon recount the story in John’s obituary in the Guardian:

It was thus that John had the vision to use Etak’s maps and technology to benefit the Jaguar system. Thus John convinced Rupert to buy Etak.

Stan Honey recounts the conversations:

But the times there are a changin’: as fate would have it in 1989 Murdoch sold the Jaguar system to Reed International for a profit of $500M. With Jaguar sold the relevance of Etak to New Corp lessened.

News Corp subsequently sold Etak to SONY, who then later sold it to Tele Atlas. And still later Tele Atlas was subsumed by TomTom. So what was originally Etak is now TomTom:

The Etak Navigator: from Etak to News Corporation to Sony to Tele Atlas to TomTom

The answer goes back to the early days of Polynesian navigation. In those days the ancient mariners navigated the seas by relying on a series of environmental cues, such as the positions of islands around them. 

Polynesian navigators

They imagined that that their boats were stationary and that the islands moved past them.

In the same way, in the Etak Navigator the vehicle is stationary and it’s the maps that move past the vehicle…

With that in mind, Stan decided to call his company Etak, which is a Polynesian term for moving navigational reference points.

When you look at any consumer mapping app in navigation mode, have you noticed something?

Have you noticed something about the symbol used to denote vehicle location?

Map navigation symbol in Apple Maps

Does it look familiar? Well, of course it does …

So it turns out the symbol used by all navigation apps today is the same one originally invented by Etak.

But why did Etak use that particular symbol?

If you talk to the engineer who wrote the original code, George Loughmiller, he’ll be meek and tell you that it seemed like a good idea at the time. But you have to remember one thing: Etak was incubated by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. And at that time both Etak and Atari were housed in the same office building at 1287 Lawrence Station Road in Sunnyvale, California.

Because Etak used a vector display with limited CPU, George needed a symbol that didn’t burden the very scarce computing resources. He also needed a symbol that was easy to read. A traditional symbol for a car — 🚗 — required too many lines. It also didn’t clearly connote direction. Something simpler was needed. 

Legend has it that one of Etak’s engineers got to see a pre-release demo of one of Atari’s latest games. And that game was…

Asteroids game

And what symbol did Asteroids use for their spaceship?

Asteroids game

And thus the symbol for vehicle navigation was born and is still used by all navigation apps globally today:

The universal map navigation symbol

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

Etak’s many significant inventions included:

I was but a pimply engineer at the time. Little did I know when I joined Etak in 1985 that I was going to be part of such an illustrious team.

My hats off and best wishes to everyone I worked with: it was a privilege, an honor and an amazing journey. Thank you.



TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: automotive; etak; gps; gpshistory; iphone; maphappenings; mappenings; maps; mobilephones; navigation; nicetoknowinfo; tomtom; vt100; wasteofbandwidth
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1 posted on 04/16/2024 7:29:03 AM PDT by ShadowAce
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To: rdb3; JosephW; martin_fierro; Still Thinking; zeugma; Vinnie; ironman; Egon; raybbr; AFreeBird; ...

2 posted on 04/16/2024 7:29:28 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux - The Ultimate Windows Service Pack )
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Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.


3 posted on 04/16/2024 7:31:54 AM PDT by xoxox
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To: ShadowAce

Yikes - width=”600” on images would help readability

I’m sure it’s a good post otherwise

I used the VT-100 and VT-101 in college on both DEC VAX 11-730 and DEC VAX 11-780


4 posted on 04/16/2024 7:37:43 AM PDT by SaveFerris (Luke 17:28 ... as it was in the Days of Lot; They did Eat, They Drank, They Bought, They Sold ......)
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To: ShadowAce
Ahead of their time by one year:

pic

5 posted on 04/16/2024 7:44:22 AM PDT by aspasia
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To: ShadowAce

Ah the first map you post shows Compton. Perhaps that was the inspiration for the Avoid Ghetto app. Would have helped Reginald Denny back in the day.


6 posted on 04/16/2024 7:45:00 AM PDT by xp38
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To: ShadowAce

Waiting for the time when I can just type in the address, or say it, and the car drives me there and makes breakfast and lunch on the way-

nah! Waiting for a lotto win so I can hire driver who packs a pickanic basket for me.


7 posted on 04/16/2024 7:53:42 AM PDT by Bob434
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To: ShadowAce

What an amazing story. I enjoyed it start to finish. I remember the “Etak” name, but did not realize the complexity of the system, the challenges of the first map digitization, and the hardware requirements in the car. Or the fact that they symbol goes back to the “Asteroids” game that I enjoyed decades ago in arcades!


8 posted on 04/16/2024 7:58:37 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (“When exposing a crime is treated like a crime, you are being ruled by criminals” – Edward SnowdenA)
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To: ShadowAce

Recalled explaining the ETAK system to an MD buddy of mine back then.

He said it was impossible! Couldn’t work!

Now he uses all the nav apps in his car, phone, etc like everyone else, lost without it all.

Luddites are soooo not fun to talk to.


9 posted on 04/16/2024 8:13:53 AM PDT by Regulator (It's fraud, Jim)
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To: ShadowAce

Paper maps are the best. While google maps et al can show you close ups of small areas, to get the bigger picture doesn’t always happen. Using a map you can more easily see if there’s a feasible alternative route to where you’re going.


10 posted on 04/16/2024 8:14:11 AM PDT by metmom (He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus…)
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To: ProtectOurFreedom

And, um, what’s really amazing is seeing a staff pic of a startup that doesn’t feature the genetic spectrum of the entire third world.

Never thought I’d miss the ‘80s. Even Mountain View was semi-affordable then.


11 posted on 04/16/2024 8:15:47 AM PDT by Regulator (It's fraud, Jim)
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To: ShadowAce

$4,049.29 in today’s decrepit cash...................


12 posted on 04/16/2024 8:20:40 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
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To: null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; bgill; bitt; ...

P


13 posted on 04/16/2024 8:29:19 AM PDT by bitt (<img src=' 'width=30%>)
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To: xoxox

14 posted on 04/16/2024 8:34:46 AM PDT by BipolarBob (The phone, the TV and the news of the world got in the house like a pigeon from hell)
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To: metmom

We still carry a National Geographic Road Atlas in the car. It’s spiral bound with a plastic front and back cover, about 11” by 15”.
I like being able to see the big picture on a nice full size map also.
Plus it works great as a lap table for eating on the road!


15 posted on 04/16/2024 8:38:29 AM PDT by 1FreeAmerican
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To: 1FreeAmerican

I just go to the local auto club and pick up some new maps every couple years.


16 posted on 04/16/2024 8:40:31 AM PDT by metmom (He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus…)
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To: ShadowAce

Navigational devices are great, but that good old fashioned paper map still trumps it. We’ve had two of them, and they both made mistakes, such as wrong turns, taking a longer distance and the worst is trying to put us on a road that does not exist.

My favorite story is a trucker that got stranded on a one lane only dirt road in the backwoods of the Black Hills. He relied on his device and got to a point to where he not only could not turn around or back up, but had no cell signal. Personally I’d say he was an idiot for getting off the paved highway onto a narrow dirt road.


17 posted on 04/16/2024 8:44:10 AM PDT by redfreedom (Joseph Stalin: "It does not mater how anyone votes, how votes are counted is what matters.")
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To: redfreedom
My favorite story is a trucker that got stranded on a one lane only dirt road in the backwoods of the Black Hills.

For years, The Dragon had an additional danger (besides the road itself)--GPS would put semi trucks onto it because the route was shorter to get from Atlanta to Knoxville.

It was quite entertaining to watch those trucks try to make those curves.

Now, there are HUGE signs at Deal's Gap and at the other end forbidding trucks access, and telling them that their GPS is wrong.

18 posted on 04/16/2024 8:49:54 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux - The Ultimate Windows Service Pack )
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To: ShadowAce

Nice ... a trip down memory lane for some of us.

How may here have played Asteroids on a video-game console in an arcade?

How many here have programmed on a VAX 11/750 (or any other VAX)? What language did you use?

How may here have worked with vector graphics?


19 posted on 04/16/2024 8:51:12 AM PDT by NorthMountain (... the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed)
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To: NorthMountain

Oh, yes ... the VT100.

I miss it. It had the second best keyboard ever. Best keyboard ever was the IBM Selectric typewriter.


20 posted on 04/16/2024 8:54:40 AM PDT by NorthMountain (... the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed)
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