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by epcoa
798 days ago
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> While GPS was around since 1978 the signal was intentionally degraded with a process known as "selective availability" until 2000. This largely rendered GPS unusable for many many purposes, definitely useless for road navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_navigation_system.
Moreover, while often not ideal in dense urban environments(modern receivers often struggle here anyways), by the late 90s differential GPS augmentation was available in cars as well, which was available in dense coastal population areas like NYC.
Old auto nav systems were clunky and with overall shitty map data but they weren't "definitely useless" due to SA. EDIT: I'll concede they were pretty bad, but SA was only one factor. With today's computing power and higher quality maps you could more easily adapt to the SA position error if it were an issue as well. |
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Automotive GPS systems existed pre-2000. So did dead-reckoning systems. Did people use them at the time? Some did. It was an amazing technology compared to the alternative, which was manually navigating a paper map.
But you'd often get errors large enough (50m avg) that it wouldn't accurately identify your location on roads close enough to provide accurate instructions. If you gave any of that tech to someone today to use, they'd think it was broken.