Casual Conversation

We had a really early one in the 90s, like way earlier than anyone else we knew, in a car we bought from some rich guy. We only used it once or twice as a novelty as my Dad always insisted he knew better. Plus it had its maps loaded up using some CD which was really out of date and it wasn’t like you could type in McDonalds and it would take you to the closest one, you had to put the whole address in and even then I think it wouldn’t find it half the time.

The first one I got was a gift in the 00s and it was bloody awful. Once I t turned me off a perfectly straight road to drive through a graveyard and then put me back on the road I had been on. Another time it turned me off and sent me down the only toll-road in the UK, then got me off at the first exit and put me back on the toll-road in the opposite direction to get me off at the place I’d got into it earlier. I had to pay twice to go nowhere and it added five minutes to my journey.

Just to add, when people came round our house in the late 90s my Dad would make me turn on the computer to show them MS Autoroute, which was an offline piece of software that was used to generate routes, basically what Google Maps does now with directions, but it would just give you something to print out. Really useful for the day and you could even get it to estimate how much the fuel would cost, etc.

I did pizza delivery for years without GPS.

Used GPS on boats as early as the late 1980’s, back when selective availability was still a thing. For those unfamiliar with it, GPS was initially military-only, and when they allowed civilian use they were concerned that US adversaries could use it for precision attacks. So SA was included in the civilian version, which introduced a random error of up to something like 1000 yards.

The truly ironic thing is that the US Coast Guard (a branch of the very military that created SA) saw the usefulness of GPS for marine navigation, but only if SA was removed. 1000 yards could easily mean the difference between a boat running aground (or worse) or not.

So the USCG built ground stations that would receive GPS signals, calculate the SA error, and broadcast a fixed signal. That was called Differential GPS, or DGPS. Boaters could buy special DGPS receivers for years, which were as accurate as GPS without the SA error.

Eventually the military was convinced to do away with SA entirely so DGPS was retired. It was only after that happened that GPS became globally useful for car, hiking, etc. navigation.

First time I used a Garmin device to mark where we dropped crab pots in the Puget Sound. Saved a lot of time hunting for our buoys.

Yeah, it was one of these when I was in the army: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Lightweight_GPS_Receiver

This didn't necessarily precede civilian GPS devices, but this was during the accuracy "embargo." Certainly though, GPS devices available to the public were cost prohibitive at that time. Later, someone bought me a Garmin for because they thought it would be useful to me in the military. I didn't have the heart to tell them I'd never need it because of the existence of very accurate military GPS devices. It was a very thoughtful gift from a family member who was a veteran

A friend of mine insisted on bringing a GPS for our bicycle trip through Europe.

From the beginning, the GPS took center stage.
At every fork in the road, instead of broadly riding in the right direction, we had to stop so he could determine which was the correct path on the tiny black-and-white display.
And half the time, he was wrong. The punch line came when a bike path he found on his device turned out to be a stair going up a 200m high hill. Took us 2 hours to get up there cause we first had to carry our bikes up, then our luggage.

The first half of the trip he spent hours trouble-shooting the connector he had built himself to keep the GPS batteries charged off the hub dynamo.
The second half of the trip we had to book camp-sites or hostels most of the time, instead of just sleeping under the stars, because the charger still didn't work, but THE DEVICE NEEDS POWER.

tl/dr: it sucked a lot of fun out of the trip. And it made me avoid all electronics on bicycle trips ever since.

Now when I ride, my phone stays in my pocket (for emergencies). I navigate by the sun when it's shining and a compass otherwise.
At the end of the day, I'll look at a paper map to see if I'm broadly in the right place and to plan the next day.
The only time I'll use my phone to navigate is when the bike breaks down or I run out of water, to find the quickest way to get help.

I had some sort of black and white screen Garmin handheld back in the early 90s. You would have to plot the location it gave you on a map to see where you were. I would get maps from Industry Canada for 250k:1 and 50k:1 of the areas I wanted to backpack in, and carry them with me. Worked well, I didn't get lost I guess, but there was also a lot of dead reckoning when the GPS couldn't get enough satellites to work.

Yeah it was a USB dongle, I think Garmin made it, and it was a huge pain to set up. Power inverter into the car charger, laptop into the power inverter, Garmin dongle into the laptop, load up the software and wait like 10 minutes for it to triangulate itself with glonass or whatever other satellite options were in there. After that it worked pretty well, but most of the time I could get to where I wanted to go before it could figure out where I was.

The original Droid was the first one I had that really impressed me, basically because of how much nicer it was than that previous experience. Now I just had to pull out my phone and launch the app, and it was accurate to within a few feet instead of a few meters! Still took them a few years to update Google maps with a lot of the new subdivisions in the area, but for a novelty navigator it was pretty cool.

I had one of the first affordable hand held GPS units made by Magellan in the mid 90's. I was doing monthly backpacking trips so it seemed like a good purchase. Soon went back to a map and compass and never went back

I remember being really amazed that I could stand in place and turn around and see my arrow on google maps turn with me. It seemed crazy it had that much precision.

Yup.

Was playing Santa, going around to the patients of the home health company I worked for at the time. We were in the boss's car and she had a dedicated GPS device. Can't recall which brand.

But it's easy to get lost in the more remote sections of the tri-county area, even with GPS.

Before GPS became ubiquitous on phones, the grunt labor for home health had to rely on mapquest and such to get to the right area, and prayer to find a specific home.

There were some of us that knew the area well, and we'd get calls from the office asking for directions to places that weren't mapped right. And that would be while we were working, or even at weird hours.

I was one of the last people I knew to have a cell phone at all, largely because I refuse to be at anyone's beck and call. But the boss actually got a phone and paid me to carry it just for directions. We got along unusually well, but it was still a very aggressive negotiation on when I would answer the damn thing.

Anyway, yeah, that winter I played Santa the first time was the first time I used a GPS device. I was driving, and could have found most of the places without one, but it was nice to not have to be constantly on the lookout for that one tree that made a driveway almost invisible, or remember exactly which curve you'd come around and have to turn off a paved road that you could barely see even if the road had been straight.

Yes, palm pilot or whatever that thing was called. It worked pretty well.

I'm in the US but I bought a TomTom in 2008 instead of Garmin because at the time, their maps of Europe were better and we were still traveling there a lot.

One of my favorite memories was the time TomTom had us drive through someone's sheep pasture in Scotland. The day before we had driven a paved road that went through pastures, and online comments mentioned that the road was indeed open to the public and you had to get out, open the gate, drive through, then close the gate.

So when it said to do it again, I trusted it. But the road was not paved. It was rutted and muddy. We were in a sedan, not anything with adequate ground clearance. And we totally got stuck in the mud. It was very likely not a public road. I'm so glad the farmer who owned it didn't come out to yell at us. I rocked the car enough to get us unstuck. We came out the other side of the field, back onto pavement, and I didn't let TomTom try to send us offroading again!

This TomTom also struggled with extreme northern latitudes. Wherever we went in Alaksa, it assumed we were about 100 yards off to the side of the road, sometimes out in the middle of Turnagain Arm 🤣, and constantly fussed at us to navigate back to the marked path.

I bought a garmin specifically to help me navigate moving on my own halfway across the USA. It was my first time moving out. It was my first time on such a long drive by myself. Lots of firsts. (I actually forgot my phone back home, since the garmin was its own device, I was more focused on having that than my cheap ass phone. Wound up pulling into a Walmart to buy a Tracfone lol)

Prior to that I used MapQuest a lot

Yes, well I didn’t use it but my brother in law had one. It was a Trimble I think. I remember it was a big, heavy boxy thing. We used it when we were out in the desert probably around ‘92.

First time I ever used one was 2004 following the grateful dead on an east coast tour.

One nice benifit was we'd come into town from the opposite direction of the caravan, avoiding a ton of traffic and finding the back route to the venue. Almost always got us better parking and way shorter lines into the lot.