As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn’t even need that
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven’t seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you’d look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy’s work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
“ADC the Map People” made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn’t seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called AllSafe J/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.
It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn’t even need that
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven’t seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you’d look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy’s work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
“ADC the Map People” made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn’t seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called
AllSafeJ/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
You can look into places where GPS is heavily jammed like Ukraine, Russia or the baltics. It’s not great, but people will adapt.