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Preceding his accomplishments at Sportvision, Stan Honey created, in 1985, an automobile navigation system showing your car's position on a moving map. This wa
by EEGuy 12y ago
Preceding his accomplishments at Sportvision, Stan Honey created, in 1985, an automobile navigation system showing your car's position on a moving map.
This was before Google Maps, before GPS, and before digital maps of cities. You couldn't just go out and buy them in 1983; Stan's company, Etak, had to create them itself [1].
Per [2], here's a description of the the hardware platform:
The original Etak Navigator was a specially-packaged Intel 8088-based
system with 256K RAM, 32K EPROM, 2K SRAM, and a cassette tape drive
on which digital maps and some of the operating system were stored.
The 8088 has a 16-bit address bus, thus can directly address only 64 K. Must have been some bank switching to get to the full 256 K RAM. This for all the code and geodata.
edits for formatting
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[1] Source: Personal conversation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak
- bitwize 12y agoThe 8088 can address 1 MiB with a somewhat wonky segment:offset addressing scheme.