Who remembers the Xerox PARC Map Viewer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

>Xerox PARC Map Viewer was one of the earliest static web mapping sites, developed by Steve Putz in June 1993 at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Xerox PARC Map Viewer was an experiment in providing interactive information retrieval, rather than access to just static files, on the World Wide Web.

>Map Viewer used a customized CGI server module written in Perl. Map images were generated in GIF format from two server side programs. MAP-WRITER created the raster images from the geographic database and RASTOGIF would convert the raster image into the GIF format.

And who remembers Metricom Ricochet wireless spread spectrum radio modems?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

>Ricochet was one of the pioneering wireless Internet access services in the United States, before Wi-Fi, 3G, and other technologies were available to the general public. It was developed and first offered by Metricom Incorporated, which shut down in 2001. The service was originally known as the Micro Cellular Data Network, or MCDN, gaining the Ricochet name when opened to public use.

>History

>Metricom was founded in 1985, initially selling radios to electric, gas, oil, and water industrial customers. One of its founders and its first President was Dr. David M. Elliott. Another of its founders was Paul Baran. Paul Allen took a controlling stake in Metricom in 1997. Service began in 1994 in Cupertino, California, and was quickly deployed throughout Silicon Valley (the northern part of Santa Clara Valley) by 1995, the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area by 1996, and to other cities throughout the end of the 1990s. By this time, the original network had been upgraded, via firmware improvements, to almost twice its original throughput, and was operating at roughly the speed of a 56 kbit/s dialup modem; in addition, Ricochet introduced a higher-speed (nominally 128 kbit/s, in practice often faster) service in 1999; monthly fees for this service were more than double those for the original service.

>At its height, in early 2001, Ricochet service was available in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and surrounding New Jersey, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Over 51,000 subscribers paid for the service. In July 2001, however, Ricochet's owner, Metricom, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down its service. Like many companies during the dot-com boom, Metricom had spent more money than it took in and concentrated on a nationwide rollout and marketing instead of developing select markets.

>Ricochet was reportedly officially utilized in the immediate disaster recovery situation of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, partially operated by former employees as volunteers, when even cell phone networks were overloaded.

And who remembers the Metricom / Xerox PARC Map Viewer Mash-Up, a decade before Google Maps?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19173570

>Remember Xerox PARC's map viewer, developed by Steve Putz in June 1993, running on a SparcStation 2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

>There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.

>Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

>I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!

>Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.

>Also:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020623093514/http://www2.parc....

>A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.

>Documentation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080621011940/http://www2.parc....

>FAQ:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080420130346/http://www2.parc....

>Details:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080608142726/http://www2.parc....

>/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).

>/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97 Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

One cool feature of the early Ricochet modems was that they supported the Hayes command set, and you could issue a command that listed the names of all the other radio modems and pole top radios that were within range. With that knowledge, you could issue the command "ATDT<name>" and connect directly to another modem or pole top box, and then issue remote commands to it, asking it to list out other radios it could see, and explore the network hop by hop!

You could also find those names and locations on the map mash-up, when they later published it, but that took all the fun of hacking out of it. But they eventually disabled those discovery features, and locked the network up more securely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376655

>EvanAnderson 8 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networ...

>I am reminded of the old Ricochet network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

http://daedalus.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/retreat.6.96/Metricom....

>It was an idea ahead of its time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531884

>creeble on Sept 19, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

>Anyone remember Metricom?

>900mhz, miles of range, dial-up modem speeds.

>hhshephard on Sept 19, 2016 [–]

>Yes, yes indeed. Changed my life in 1998 when I no longer had to be in the office when on Pager Duty. Just velcroed a ricochet modem to my laptop and I was good to go from anywhere. We kind of take that convenience for granted these days.

Metricom's radio modems were based on spread spectrum radio technology invented by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum#Invention_of_f...

>During World War II, Golden Age of Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed an intended jamming-resistant radio guidance system for use in Allied torpedoes, patenting the device under U.S. Patent 2,292,387 "Secret Communications System" on August 11, 1942. Their approach was unique in that frequency coordination was done with paper player piano rolls - a novel approach which was never put into practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

>At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Antheil

>In 1941, Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code (stored on a punched paper tape) to synchronise random frequencies, referred to as frequency hopping, between a receiver and transmitter. It is one of the techniques now known as spread spectrum, widely used in telecommunications. This work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.