Right, the handheld only stored points. However, it had a lot of uses.
It could store a lot of waypoints, breadcrumb-style, so you could backtrack when on a hike. It stored precise coordinates for navigation back to points of interest, that otherwise aren’t marked on maps. It quickly calculated accurate speed and direction info, so it was useful for navigating at sea or in the air (true speed and direction available, no need to second guess water or air currents). I even brought them on long distance car trips, and it would report how far to my final destination, and it was gratifying to see this number tick down to 10 m when I finally parked in front of my friend’s home.
There were a lot of things you could do with it, and I did them all. But, I guess the old handhelds could be seen as not that useful to non-navigation nerds.
Hey, remember in the 50’s when science fiction rockets were big steel things designed to come back and land on their tails? And how the Space Shuttle proved that to be so quaint and simplistic, and how we all knew composites were the future? Well…
On the other hand, almost 50 years after the last Apollo mission, humans have still not made it past low Earth orbit.
That last one would blown away peope from 1985. We were supposed to go to Mars in the 1990s.
People in 1985 are familiar with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The attackers utilized dozens of ships, hundreds of airplanes, and thousands of Japanese military personnel. It was a massive undertaking on the part of the Japanese, and the whole event sank several US naval vessels and killed about 2300 US military personnel. In response, the US and its allies pursued a war with the goal of punishing and subjugating the attacking country, with said war lasting just under four years. For many decades, Pearl Harbor was the benchmark for dastardly and devastating sneak attacks.
In 16 years, a team of 19 men armed with nothing more than box cutters will completely level half a dozen buildings in New York, including two of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. They’ll kill about 3000 civilians. In response, the US and its allies will start a war with the goal of finding and punishing the mastermind who planned the whole thing. That war will last for twenty years - ten years longer than it took to find and kill the aforementioned mastermind.
Even more appalling on this thread is the idea that SCOTUS supports the public school football coach who can choose who plays on the basis that they participate in his public prayer sessions.
As an aside, I was in an Arts College’s summer school on a small island, back in the mid-seventies… One of the students (M, 30-ish) had gone on a date with a mysterious woman the night before. The next morning, sipping coffee in the sand dunes waiting for the teachers, we asked him how it went… He smirkily raised an eyebrow and whispered conspiratorially: "She has…
Body x-rays weren’t mandatory, but metal detectors and bag x-rays were, and I don’t think the body x-rays were such a huge addition to that, in that they’re just a combination of the two concepts (you walk through a thing to detect stuff you shouldn’t have, and it uses x-rays).
I remember in the early 80s a TV station investigative reporter putting a piece of 1/4-in. plate in the shape of a snub-nose revolver in his carry-on bag and merrily getting it past the check-point, X-rayed or not, several times. There was no ticket confirmation in those simpler times, either.
I think Limmin answered most of this, but I want to make it clear that what you’re describing is a “moving map” GPS, which was a high-end thing in the late 1990s. I have a more basic GPS unit somewhere in the basement, a handheld unit (Garmin, IIRC) that was included when we bought our airplane in 2006. It can only display longitude and latitude numbers, and an arrow pointing to the next programmed waypoint, but no map at all.
Makes you wonder at the true goal(s) of the war. So convoluted, it’s similar in my mind to the Iran-Contra situation. Which was going on up to about 1985. So maybe not so hard to believe for people of that era.
Well, yeah. My point is that in 1985, he was barely known, but, meanwhile became the highest paid actor in the world and even now a household name. The poor phrasing threw me off. It should say, “Say something to a person from 1985 that is true today which will make you sound like a crazy person.” I get it now. I should have just said, " The Donald used to be POTUS."
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