Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps

Summary

As many of you may know, my career started back in 1985 at a wee company called Etak. This startup, seed funded by Nolan Bushnell, was most famous for pioneering in-vehicle navigation systems. It was about 20 years ahead of its time. But it didn’t stop there. Navigation systems require digital maps. The problem was that there weren’t any available at that time, so Etak had to invent a system to manufacture them at scale. And yours truly was privileged to be part of the team that designed and built the production line. It wasn’t straightforward. Using a VAX minicomputer with 2MB RAM the team designed a system that was used to scan photographic images of topographic maps. These were then manually digitised on cobbled together PC-clones that used very expensive state-of-the-art graphics cards. \Topographic map used as source for digital map making. Credit: USGS Despite the herculean efforts of everybody involved there was a little problem. The accuracy of the maps depended on the source material. In our case we relied on topographic maps published by national mapping agencies. Alas, these maps were often years out of date. Don’t forget this was 1985. Aerial imagery and satellite imagery just wasn’t readily available back then. We could (and did) contact local agencies for more up-to-date maps of critical intersections, but this was really hard to do at scale. It was just too time consuming and too expensive to track all the material down. The original Etak Navigator didn’t provide turn-by-turn directions. Instead it guided you to your location by a flashing star on the map. You zoomed the map as you drove and had to use your own noggin to figure out which roads to take to get there. As a result the requirements for the digital map were incredibly light: we didn’t need to collect information on one way systems or turn restrictions. We just collected the streets, the street names and the addresses and we made sure we got the road topology right. It was only later when th...