On pcactive.nl it is time again for the weekly column by John Vanderaart. Earlier he had all the troubles around his navigation system and he focused on Facebook, now it’s time for travel romanticism …
Last week I had an OR training at our location in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. Nice, heavy and at the end of the day with the other boys and girls a dinner in a beautiful restaurant in the center. I was allowed to ride and see how Google Maps guided us. I thought it was just a strange guidance, because about 12 kilometers detour … but according to Google Maps this was really the fastest route and it turned out to be the case, because on ‘my’ route everything was wall-and-wall-fixed (= deep red on the map). A leap of thought brought me more than 25 years ago in time. With the then young children at the then during the February holiday somewhere in the Norman hinterland. I had a laptop on the center console of the Kia Pregio van. Connected to the cigarette lighter with a 12-to-220 volt-inverter. A serial GPS receiver the size of a lunch box; With only reception when located on top of the dashboard directly behind the windshield and with a first version of Route 66 as software. The map of Western Europe was global, indicated by only the big roads on it. With in the middle of that map (thanks to that serial GPS receiver) a point that told us we were driving on. At that time one of the great wonders of technology! Still? After the necessary fiddling we had found it. La Haye-Pesnel was called the town, where there is no damage to a blind horse at Boer Denis. I miss that travel romanticism a bit, today …
Route 66. The first navigation program with which I went ‘en route’