NavList:

Joe Dempster, you wrote:
"The UK article you referenced from 1978 caught my interest.  It is locked behind a paywall and the only issue available on Amazon was the previous one."

Hmm... UK article?? I posted some adverts from AW&ST magazine from that era. Is that what you meant? I should have mentioned... those will appear to be behind a paywall, but it turns out that you can access articles in their archive without a subscription. It seems you can get in with a free account after registering -- Aviation Week & Space Technology archives.

You posted a link to a pdf and wrote:
"I did locate the interesting summary from CMU"

Beware. That's a low-quality history. It strikes me as little more than some student's term paper in a tech class. References are mediocre and formulaic. The article is loaded with clichés. It repeats historical legends (including the simplistic KAL007 story that Richard Easton discussed in his article). And it seems to have been written in the late 1990s --twenty years ago. And remember the technology is forty years old so that's half the history of GPS).

Frank Reed

PS: Have any of you bought an Android smartphone within the past year? Anyone have one equipped to receive Galileo and Beidou signals? Many smartphones now receive GNSS signals from these constellations in addition to GPS and Glonass. If you want to test your phone's capabilities, try the Android "GPS Test" app(s). There are multiple variants of this (forks from one project?).