Navigation systems of the 90s (... no 80s, ... no 70s!) [LWN.net]

Navigation systems of the 90s (... no 80s, ... no 70s!)

Posted Mar 3, 2009 14:34 UTC (Tue) by mcatkins (guest, #4270)
In reply to: Navigation systems of the 90s by rvfh
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

I saw a demonstration of a system that calculated left/right directions
to follow a route sometime around 1978 (definitely before 1980!). This
was at an open day at the Transport and Road Research Establishment
(as was - a UK government research establishment).

The Teletype was not easily car-mountable (the computer was worse :-), and
the map data was somewhat limited, but the principle was the same.

Now, did they publish? Or was it "too obvious"?

Martin

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Navigation systems of the 90s (... no 80s, ... no 70s!)

Posted Mar 4, 2009 11:13 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Provided that the establishment you describe worked like similar ones in my country at the time, it probably had been published in some obscure governement research report series that almost nobody ever read. And it almost certainly is not online, but might well be in the collection of some university library. If it was even theoretically available to the public, it would count as prior art.