Similar to borrowing a book from thousands of miles away, crossing the country without asking for directions would also require of number of technologies to come together. Showing the key ones off would take us, and our party, from the beach to behind the wheel of our 1990 Plymouth Laser.
The Internet was the fundamental “plumbing” that enabled borrowing books from miles away (along with just about everything else we do these days). The Global Positioning System (GPS) was the equivalent for crossing the country without asking for directions.
GPS, the U.S. Department of Defense satellite-based worldwide positioning system, became available for civilian use in 1988, with hobbyist and handheld GPS receivers soon to follow. Alan put together a home-brew receiver, based on a GPS circuit board from Trimble Navigation. This contraption could then be connected to a PowerBook through an RS-232 serial cable, enabling the laptop to programmatically determine its longitude and latitude anywhere in the country.
Making geographic coordinates into useful information required mapping software. Alan scanned in a map of their Cupertino neighborhood and wrote some custom HyperCard-based software to plot the GPS coordinates on that map in real time.
Mounting the GPS antenna on the roof of their partymobile, Alan and Priscilla were able to treat party goers to a taste of the “cross the country without asking for directions” Future. Well, at least cross south Cupertino.
The beach party GPS demo was fun and literally showed where we were going. The AT&T You Will ad showed even more, including route planning, turn-by-turn directions and crowd-sourced real-time traffic monitoring.
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