RWTH Aachen University | borchers@cs.rwth-aachen.de
A few months ago my sweetheart said one of those things that would make any geek start drooling: “I hate getting lost each time I drive into Cologne. Can’t we get a Tom Tom?” I love getting a free ticket to spend obscene amounts of cash on a gadget, without all the weak, post-hoc rationalizing of why it’s so useful, which is usually met with something between fury and pity, depending on its price tag, size, number of cables, and overall potential for destroying your living room’s visual appearance. But I digress.
For those of you who have been living under a gadget-proof rock for the past few years, a Tom Tom (mine is a GO 910) is a GPS car-navigation system made by the current market leader of the same name. You stick it to your windshield with a suction cup, tap in your destination address, and off you go, hopefully in the right direction.
It has also become the technology to most profoundly influence my everyday life since my first DSL flat rate in 2001. And that’s despite not being a regular driver—or maybe just because of that.
Now, I will admit that I got
my first mapping-software fix back in ’97, when a little-known Dutch software company called Palmtop had just released EnRoute, a route-planning application for my favorite personal computing device of all time, the Psion Series 5 PDA.
But back then, of course, there was no live navigation support. GPS devices were still something supremely geeky, and well beyond the purchasing power of your ordinary com-puter-science grad student (i.e., me). Geocaching had not even been invented.
Also, in all honesty, only geeks had PDAs back then, so this was definitely not yet affecting the public at large. But we, the bold and fearless early adopters, could explore this strangely empowering new world of geographical information literally at our fingertips. While I hardly used it for the demanding task of live, in-car navigation, it became indispensable to quickly estimate driving times when planning trips, or to simply hide my deep geographical ignorance in a conversation on, say, the wonderful architecture of Barcelona, by discreetly check-
ing which country that was in again.
While it did become possible later to attach a GPS to your PDA (until you realized that multiple loose devices, power adapters, and 200 feet of cable around your dashboard weren’t exactly safe, and that setting up took longer than most actual trips), it wasn’t until around 2004 that Palmtop—now renamed Tom Tom!—and others started selling all-in-one devices, and live navigation support became a realistic option for the average consumer.
Boy, what a difference. Instead of having to map out each new trip in advance; write down or print out those instructions that as soon as you hit the road you realize are conveniently still sitting on the kitchen table; have your codriver call a friend for instructions on a bad cell phone connection, which he’d then repeat back to you while you’re nervously peeking at each new street sign because it could just be the one where you had to make a right (or was it left?)—in short, instead of this constant sense of sublime (or not so sublime, depending on the nature of your fellow
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