[3] Etak's initial start-up funding came from Nolan Bushnell, famous for starting Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater.
[4] "[Co-founder Stan Honey] was doing military-related research at SRI International in 1983 when he sailed with Pong inventor and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell to victory in a Transpac race.
Bushnell gave him $500,000 in seed money, and digital-mapping firm Etak (named after a Polynesian term for navigation) was born.
From then on, the system self-corrected: error accumulated through dead reckoning could usually be reduced by checking to see if the current location and direction of movement corresponded to a street in the map data.
[3] The Navigator enjoyed a brief vogue, selling a few thousand units in a few years, and even finding its way to the dashboard of pop star Michael Jackson.
[11] It also appeared in a 1991 feature film "Nothing But Trouble", shown being used in a BMW by Chevy Chase and Demi Moore (albeit with a color display).
Etak licensed its car navigation technology to other companies, notably Clarion in Japan, Bosch (Blaupunkt) in Germany (as the TravelPilot), as with Delco earlier.
Japan had gotten an earlier start in car navigation efforts with Honda's Electro Gyrocator and other projects, but had not created a successful product.
As reported in Fortune magazine in 1992: "[Etak] was the first to begin electronic mapping of Japanese cities in 1987, hoping to enable ambulance services and others to find addresses on computer screens.
Originally marketed to business travelers, SkyMap included two CD-ROMs (Eastern and Western US), a remote control, dashboard GPS antenna, and a PCMCIA card for laptops.
[16] In 1995 News Corp expanded Etak's field operations unit to more quickly create accurate maps of major US cities.
Under Sony's ownership, urban core projects were started in 1997 in Portland, Sacramento, Boston, New York, Las Vegas, San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Kokomo, Indiana, due to the agreement with GM's Delphi (formerly Delco) unit.
As the Etak map database was built (on old TIGER files) and updated, the field operations unit reassigned personnel to smaller satellite offices.