Tomorrow's World showcased the cassette-powered precursor to sat nav. So many reasons why this would never work in the real world. Micael Rodd presenter
Could they even fathom? Pinpoint location accuracy, speech recognition, natural text to speech in almost every language, billions of points of interest with menu pricing and petrol pricing listed along with phone numbers, speedometer, live traffic updates, real imagery, audio all steamed wirelessly to your car's stereo, built into a touchscreen device that can fit in your pocket and can make calls, instantly message anyone on the planet, stream studio quality audio and cinema quality video over the air and be unplugged for the better part of the day while doing all this! Oh and it can be purchased for about the price of a good suit.
"It is giving me plenty of time for me to position myself on the road so that I can negotiate the hazard of changing direction with the utmost convenience" - This is the most British sentence I heard this month
Could they even fathom? Pinpoint location accuracy, speech recognition, natural text to speech in almost every language, billions of points of interest with menu pricing and petrol pricing listed along with phone numbers, speedometer, live traffic updates, real imagery, audio all steamed wirelessly to your car's stereo, built into a touchscreen device that can fit in your pocket and can make calls, instantly message anyone on the planet, stream studio quality audio and cinema quality video over the air and be unplugged for the better part of the day while doing all this! Oh and it can be purchased for about the price of a good suit.
JAZZ MAN that’s what he played on his way home from work everyday. My dad really did leave and once I became an adult, I totally understood why. I forgave him with extreme prejudice.
You got it all wrong, of course you would mail-order the tape for your journey, four to six weeks in advance. For a surcharge of only 1 GBP, you would get the return journey on the B side.
Ahhh, you dumbass Brits and your TV licences. They tried that shit in Australia for a while until they realised it was ridiculous. And it's not as though paying a fee has saved you from advertisements..
Blue moooonnnn. You had me driving all wrong.. I drove to Trafalgar square, when I wanted to go hommmeee.... blue moooonnnn, *drives into a ravine in the dark*
A cassette! A giant improvement over older navigation systems that required you to thread the reel of tape through the playback mechanism. This was found to be difficult to do whilst driving.
I was just telling my 16-year old daughter who is learning to drive how archaic things were in the 70's and 80's.... how we kept folded maps in the glove box. I told her how revolutionary it was when MapQuest came out and we could then print our own maps! Who'd have thought in the future we'd have phones telling us where to go?
@@PanixATK slovenly seppos = world's greatest innovators. they created electricity, radio, the internet, and sex. don't forget the greatest empire the world's ever seen.
@@fazeka at 1:09 did he turn a manual choke? I don't recall that on my 1963 Beetle. But then mine was in California; maybe the England version was a bit different? Anyway in 1964 the rear license plate light (the "beak") was widened (more like a flat nose) so my guess would be 1962.
@@bennri No, he turned the ignition switch off. But yes I see what appears to be a choke (or perhaps an accessory ciggie lighter?) on the side nearest the steering wheel. Pre-'61 U.S. spec. bugs had a manual choke in that location. I suspect that maybe the British bugs had manual chokes still in '62? The shot of the dashboard showing the windshield wiper switch knob has what appears to be the concentric button for the windshield washer. As per "Progressive Refinements" (references incremental changes put in place by VW during production): "Modification: Press button on wiper switch for windshield washer. Date introduced: 31 July 1961 (1962 model year)." Source: oacdp.org/progref4061/e016.jpg Also note larger taillights throughout numerous shots, introduced 1962 model year.
@@fazeka I see it just took a while for the motor to stop spinning. After viewing at some videos of people selling 62 and 63 models, I think it could be either. Some models have those two extra white knobs under the dashboard, some don't.
Really incredible-the announcements sound just like a modern GPS. I love seeing stuff like this that got it exactly right decades before its time. Would be fun to meet the engineers.
The portable telephone is now a reality, thanks to British boffins. A backpack of quite manageable weight contains the batteries and electronic circuit boards required to communicate through radio waves with a British Telecom antenna in central London. The range of the communication is over 3 miles, which means one may place telephone calls even from a street on the other side of the Thames. The rotary dial is conveniently placed on the end of a long cable, so the telephone may be used while the backpack is still worn.
Michael Rodd. The perfect example of a clear, concise presenter. You believed that he knew what he was talking about and wasn't just reading a script. The pace of delivery was just right to take in often complex new concepts. A friendly, smiling and modest character who's presence on our TVs was always welcome. A unique and much loved talent in my opinion. So nice to think back to those days. I miss Michael about as much as I miss the traffic free roads. Apparently, somebody recorded the Top 40 chart show over the cassette for Canvey Island... Oh well, every cloud.....
"Please turn around when it's safe to do so." "Please turn around when it's safe to do so." "Please turn around when it's safe to do so." "Recalculating route.... Please flip the tape over!"
@@dunstun365 : So that's why we can't hear the racket that Beetle engines always made. Anyway, the cameraman and make-up crew didn't know the way either.
Considering this was a concept a couple decades before GPS, it was quite a revolutionary idea. Much like the SciFi tech of StarTrek, this could be considered the genesis of our navigation systems today. Amazing. I liked in particular the ability to program the parameters with a plug in circuit board.
@@larsanderson3072 Mine was a Garmin and it had a womans voice which was quite annoying. I was driving along a dual carriage way and the voice said..."You have entered a dead end, please do a U turn". I unplugged it and and threw it out the window. Driving is more peaceful now even if I do get lost more often.👍😁
A cassette of tape no less! That'll show Jonny foreigner a clean set heels I'll be bound! I trust they'll be selecting a voice with better diction for the production model.
Excellent! The next time I'm traveling through the Chatham area of Kent I'll be sure to install the Playing Unit, measure my tire size, connect the appropriate circuit board to the Control Unit, connect the cable from the Control Unit to the milometer, and load up my collection of pre-recorded cassette tapes. Talk about convenience!
In 45 years we'll be laughing at the current self driving car videos like we are laughing at this one today. We'll some of us will, at least...I'll probably be dead.
@@bubo2528 : We will die of overpopulation instead (wars over resources, people killing each other for food and living space). Oh, that will happen eventually anyway but just not as soon.
@@bubo2528: The problem remains as long as some cultures think having lots of children is macho - Bin Laden's father had 56 of them. The snowflakes say it's "because they are poor, so we must make them richer", but Bin Laden snr was a multi-millionaire, so BS.
Cas Nav! Lol, if you missed a turn or went the wrong way the mileometer wouldn't know otherwise and would just stick to the pre recorded directions at where you should be! That would be fun!
My cousin had a TomTom satnav which did that for a laff. It dropped him in Birmingham in the rush-hour by refusing to go any further. Now that's one mean piece of technology.
I honestly think that this was a well thought and an advance device, well ahead of its time. It certainly is not scalable I.e for the amount of cassettes you need to navigate through U.K., but still Kudos to all who had invented it.
This is so funny . I once took a trip from Nottingham to Birmingham and recorded a cassette. Minus the fancy timer . I just switched it on when I needed it . It worked .
It's amazing how many of today's technologies were originally devised many years before they became practical. I think Cadillac had automatic headlight dippers in the 1950's using a valve (tube) operated device. It was unreliable but the idea was there.
Like so many of the prototype products shown on Tomorrow's World, this one is pretty useless. But the idea was there, and that was the point. Once new, better technology allowed it to be made workable, the satnav as we know it was developed.
So there you have it... the origin of people driving their cars into lakes because their navigation system told them to do it was Tomorrow’s World in the early Seventies.
I remember wrapping a cassette tape round our house as a kid(fairly obvious) & just waiting! There was miles of it. We ran around waving at my mum in the kitchen-where mums belonged back then! She got scissors & laughed! The doors all opened inwards 😂
If you were going from the south coast up to Scotland using just A and B roads it was a good idea to take a trailer to hold all the Cassettes of Tape.....
Chubby Chubbs While also carrying a boot load of food and not forgetting to book a weeks holiday just to get there. Using A and B roads would have took you forever especially in this contraption. I think the M6 was probably just started when this was filmed, going by the many pre-modern sign-posts and the odd Ford Anglia in the picture.
David F Good point David, living in Brum I used the M6 hundreds of times.....not a nice part of a days work, but only having a laugh about the early technology.
Legend has it you can still hear the screeching of the VW falling into the river after every midnight even 50yrs later...GPS computer systems were improved after this tragedy...
Could they even fathom? Pinpoint location accuracy, speech recognition, natural text to speech in almost every language, billions of points of interest with menu pricing and petrol pricing listed along with phone numbers, speedometer, live traffic updates, real imagery, audio all steamed wirelessly to your car's stereo, built into a touchscreen device that can fit in your pocket and can make calls, instantly message anyone on the planet, stream studio quality audio and cinema quality video over the air and be unplugged for the better part of the day while doing all this! Oh and it can be purchased for about the price of a good suit.
I used to have one of those but ended up having a serious traffic accident when the cassette player started spewing the tape all over the floor and jammed my feet on the pedals.
Just wow! As long as there's no diversions, this works even better than modern SatNav ... you get much more detailed instructions "turn right just before McDonalds into Eddington Road" etc. I like how they cleverly linked the distance travelled to the car's mileometer.
Not just diversion - would foul up if you missed a turning. I often miss turnings with a satnav because I'm in wrong lane on an unfamilair road. A satnag gets you out of that with a route re-calculation. I hate to think of trying to get this thing out of a mess - rewinding tape etc.
This archaic video clip should be shown in schools, so the youth of today can truly appreciate satellite navigation technology built into virtually every smartphone today. I recall navigating my way across the UK in the early 1990s using just maps!
"Cassette of Tape" - it's a long time since I heard it called that. Also tickled by the phrase "And if I ever use a different route, I simply use a different Cassette". I am assuming the boot is full of cassettes for every conceivable journey. Sorry, I meant to write: "The boot is full of Cassettes of tape for every conceivable journey".
Now if you'd just bought the version of that car in white, with red and blue go faster stripes and the number 53 on the side, it would have driven itself.
One aspect not mentioned by the commentator and all cassette player owners will well remember is the dreaded "tape shredding" where the tape in the cassette hooks around the roller and gets sucked into the internals of the player. Bad enough when you are just watching "White Room" being turned into a brown streamer, a bit worse when you are depending on that tape for navigation. Love the video. The Beetle is an absolute classic car.
That was seriously over-engineered. "Were would you like to go today Jean?" "Oh let's go to Skegness!" "Ok, let me just send off for the cassette, should only take a couple of weeks to arrive."
watching a wheel go round a certain number of times and then toggling a relay is indeed much more over engineered than designing and launching 60 odd satelites that need to use relativity to work properly and then inventing microchips ;)
I would like the upmarket version: A home film projector with the reels in the back seat, and a screen hanging off the rear view mirror where the film is projected.
It was 7 years later that I was navigating Kent and Essex with the Cassettes "Freebird" Lynard Skinnard "Do You Feel Like I Do" Peter Frampton plus "I'm in Love with My Car and Radar Love and it was All Hands to the RAC Map every which way when we got Lost (often)🤘🔥 The 2020 "Hey Google" is actually a PURE NAVIGATIONAL BLESSING ❤️
