NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Jul 22, 20:27 -0700
Roger, you wrote:
"What’s most interesting about these ads is that they don’t mention GPS use in ordinary cars! "
Right?! At least the first advert mentions "ambulances and fire trucks". That suggestion must have seemed too incredible a year later. Do you suppose it was because they imagined receivers would be too large and cumbersome? Or did they imagine that receivers would be too expensive for ordinary cars? Could anyone have even fantasized in 1977 that receivers would be tiny chipsets so cheap that billions of GPS units would be in the pockets of people all over the globe?! Could any sane person have dreamed that GPS-equipped pocket supercomputers would arrive in rural corners of impoverished countries before reliable electric power and that solar-charging stations for those devices in a place like Rwanda would be a viable business?
Frank Reed
