Citroen XM Multimedia & other early IT in cars

[NewcastleFalcon]

FindoutintheFCF

Regards Neil

[mickthemaverick]

That article says the first "truly automotive navigation system" was developed by Honda in 1981. Well what about James's system in his DB5 in 1965 I say. Worked all the way to Geneva!!!

[Hell Razor5543]

That article says the first "truly automotive navigation system" was developed by Honda in 1981. Well what about James's system in his DB5 in 1965 I say. Worked all the way to Geneva!!!

True, but it had a REALLY annoying beep every few moments!

[NewcastleFalcon]

I'll bet that the entertainment kit in that cost more than a couple of small cars.

In 1981 Honda offered the "Electro Gyro-Cator" navigation unit. The unit was optional for the equivalent of about $2,750 – nearly 25 percent of the price of the actual cars themselves.

https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/

Regards Neil

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[Paul-R]

Windows CE... I once dabbled in it... It promised much but did not really fully deliver but I think in those days the hardware was the limitation rather than any fundamental issue with CE itself...

I have a CE tablet which I picked up for a couple of quid at our radio club's junk sale previously owned gems a couple of years ago.

Never been able to a damn thing with it whenever I've switched it on!

[NewcastleFalcon]

Worked all the way to Geneva!!!

regards Neil

[CitroJim]

In 1981 Honda offered the "Electro Gyro-Cator" navigation unit. The unit was optional for the equivalent of about $2,750 – nearly 25 percent of the price of the actual cars themselves.

https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/

Interesting link Neil

Gosh, how things have moved on...

I have a full GPS navigation system complete with world maps on my wrist

The first navigation system I remember was 'Auto Route' running on a 286 PC back in the late 80s... It was a real piece of magic... The software lived on two 5 1/4" floppy disks...

[mickthemaverick]

In 1981 Honda offered the "Electro Gyro-Cator" navigation unit. The unit was optional for the equivalent of about $2,750 – nearly 25 percent of the price of the actual cars themselves.

https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/

Interesting link Neil

Gosh, how things have moved on...

I have a full GPS navigation system complete with world maps on my wrist

The first navigation system I remember was 'Auto Route' running on a 286 PC back in the late 80s... It was a real piece of magic... The software lived on two 5 1/4" floppy disks...

I remember Autoroute, I used to run it in the office on my RM 380 with twin 51/4 drives and CPM. Good days!!

[CitroJim]

twin 51/4 drives and CPM. Good days!!

Ahh! CP/M! Magic That brings back memories It was the first Disk Operating System I learned and got quite competent with it... Even to programming in machine code and C...

There was some great software available for it too... One was Wordstar which was truly was excellent, a database (Ashton-Tate Dbase II) and a spreadsheet, the name of which escapes me now... Supercalc maybe?

I also used to look after a multi-user system based on CP/M called MP/M. It was hellishly advanced for the time as it ran multiple instances of what we would now call virtual instances of CP/M, one for each user under an executive... Each instance served an individual dumb terminal... The central hard disk and printers were all shared between users...

Looking back, it worked very much like VMWare does... (or how VMWare did just prior to my retirement...)

Knowing CP/M certainly helped transition to MS-DOS when it became dominant on the PC and CP/M faded into obscurity... Except on the Amstrad CPC and PCW home computers, of which I had one

[white exec]

Never into operating systems or programming like Jim, I cut my PC teeth on an Opus 8088, MS-DOS, and a w.p. package called Wordcraft. This wasn't wysiwyg, but used codes and colours (colour, eventually!) on screen to flag fonts, bold, italic, underline, indents, etc. Decent print output, for subsequent offset printing, was from a Juki daisywheel printer, which would drop into Pause each time a wheel (font) needed changing.

We continued with Wordcraft for a good few years, but added Canon LBP4 b/w laser printers, with "hard fonts" available on printer plug-in font cartridges. These A4 Canons were the thick end of £1000 apiece, and the font cartridges around £100. How prices have fallen!

I moved on from Education just as MS Word was taking off. Wysiwyg was hugely welcome, although my OH was using it daily with Wordperfect II. Word has proved hugely durable, and versions have built nicely on each other, with backward compatibility - something MS have done really well IMO.

In the 70s and 80s manual cut'n'paste was a routine activity. "Camera-ready copy" needed to be created for subsequent offset platemaking or photocopying, so scalpels, green cutting boards, parallel-scale rulers, PrittStik or Copydex, and yellow-printed lay-up paper were the daily tools. An Agfa repro camera and Copyproof was pretty much standard too, which enabled rapid re-sizing, image manipulation and photo (half-tone) screening. All this made the move to on-screen page make-up an easy progression.

[CitroJim]

Canon LBP4 b/w laser printers, with "hard fonts" available on printer plug-in font cartridges.

I remember those printers with some fondness Chris... Built like tanks as I recall and very reliable

[NewcastleFalcon]

Interesting link Neil
Gosh, how things have moved on...

Here's another tongue-in-cheek illustration of the old and the new. Software-cars are full of it these days. Here's 2 update methods.

1. Bonnets up, wires plugged in as illustrated by VW updating their ID3 Fleet prior tor delivery.

Meanwhile in a very large parking lot there are a lot of Teslas...
2. Over-the-air update, not a wire in sight...
Video wont embed story here
https://electrek.co/2021/02/07/tesla-up ... ns-coming/

Regards Neil

[mickthemaverick]

Love the simultaneous Tesla titillation!!

[NewcastleFalcon]

Who knew Citroen XM multimedia has a thread on the FCF....Well I did, and everbody in the global FCF viewing audience does today if they happen to have clicked onto the thread today as it briefly returns to the top end of the active topics list.

In the FCF news here

viewtopic.php?p=817027#p817027

... may be of interest to boost someone's collection:



Details here

Neil

[CitroJim]

And an XM dos look awesome in that colour