Really intensive on infrastructure and coding it up. Nowadays the infrastructure is actually more expensive, but from a user perspective it is very simple. Navstar system (aka GPS) was costed at around $24billion last I heard. We piggy-back off that, largely for free nowadays. The user interface is also expensive to code up but companies like Google make their money back in other ways. It is still an expensive system, but the user usually doesn't see much up-front expense.How would they implement it? We barely had really basic calculators in 1971, no computers that could reasonably fit into a car.
I lived in Melbourne Florida in 1979. I heard a story many years ago. A guy was on a airliner. The PA came on and announced that they would be landing in Oaklands shortly. The guy says I thought this plane was going to Oakland in California.Really intensive on infrastructure and coding it up. Nowadays the infrastructure is actually more expensive, but from a user perspective it is very simple. Navstar system (aka GPS) was costed at around $24billion last I heard. We piggy-back off that, largely for free nowadays. The user interface is also expensive to code up but companies like Google make their money back in other ways. It is still an expensive system, but the user usually doesn't see much up-front expense.
FYI, here in Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) we had the world's most advanced passenger tracking system back in around 1986. I ran the maintenance for it. Everything from the PDP11 computers, to the operators screens to the electronics on the trams and buses, radio base stations and the signposts. Basically all major intersections on a route were fitted with short-range radio transmitters (signposts). Their lithium batteries gave them a life of about 10 years before needing replacement. When a bus or tram passed a signpost, it would register the code. When the vehicle was polled (eight vehicles per second per base station site) it would report its last signpost code and distance traveled. "251-207, distance 157m". The computer at our command center would then place it on a map for the operators. Drivers got constant updates of where they were relative to the scheduled service. We still run the system electronics, but the system has switched to GPS for position. Fun fact: the system was sold to us by a company in Texas and we developed it further from there.
Wow ... I remember reading that magazine and that specific article when I was young. It was probably more like 1976 or 1977 when I was 14 or 15 that I read it. I was checking out several electronics magazines at a time from our library.Forgot to mention. I purchased that magazine from the newsagency when I was nine years old .
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