The time Microsoft made a car stereo - The Auto PC Story 

Pretty dang cool.the voice reminds me of the datsun 280z alert chimes.

Reply To Big car Please Make Video & story about daihatsu Please

The pocket pc. I love these devices. It's really a shame they stopped making them... basically they evolved into smartphones known today. Iphone took the form factor of these pdas (a giant screen with no keyboard) meanwhile Android was also copying windows mobile.. but they went after the wrong one, the "smartphone edition" which was a device that looked like blackberry but with windows mobile. Apple picked "windows mobile classic" or "windows mobile professional" essentially these were same, you know the touch screen ones with no keyboard, the only difference is one was classic pda and other one had a phone. From there they made their own dumbed UI wih alot of eye candy, complete with dumbed down device that only had one button instead several. Obviosly the apples concept catched on, android realized that and quickly copied the dumbed interface and swapped the blackberry type device with the touchscreen one. Unlike apple android the flexibility of windows mobile, rather than making the locked down os like iOS and Windows Phone that microsoft made later. In an attempt to catch up, Microsoft made exact opposite of their older windows mobile. Probably because they thought the fact iPhone is locked down, non costumizable, flexible, no sd slot,... you know all of it's negatives, is what made apple popular. It's no wonder WP failed. Should had just improved win mo rather than kill it. That was their best chance.

@@bairikatte I'd like to - not sure when.

@@beardsntools They were horrible. This radio is horrible. They took something that was simple and worked well and made it suck and made it overly complicated with a UI that didn't work. Have you ever spent any time in the hood? If that UI can't pick out a British accent, it will not pick out the accent of the hood.

Hey Matt! Loved Building 32. Lots of good memories.

@@BigCar2 Yep! The skybridge to building 31 was cool too.

where does all these take place? UK? Seattle?

This is amazing

@@CuoreSportivo Redmond, Washington… near Seattle.

A very small list of words (just 200), and all trained for a generic American accent.

It may work fine in a stationary, quiet environment, but consider challenges like engine, tire, wind, HVAC noise, kids playing around in the back, sunroof and windows open. Even today, my car automatically decreases fan speed when you activate voice recognition.

Should be elementary to run Doom on it

90s Microsoft was garbage they bullied the entire PC industry into using its crap Internet Explorer browser, Windows 95 was junk, Windows 98 was decent…let’s not forget Microsoft Bob and MS Office and their annoying prick of a paper clip.

@@waltkowalski9040 I really don't think 95 was any worse than 98, at least not the OSR 2.x versions anyway. I've seen this quite a bit lately, is it just to line up with the perceived "every other version is bad" thing?

90's Microsoft was basically grown on crime and corruption, and its monopoly position abuse did absolutely astounding damage to the whole world. If Microsoft had been wiped off the face of the Earth in the 90's the world would have been a much better place.

What's some good standard factory systems?

Oh and I am very certain they went straight to Floor 2 and totally didn't check out what was goin on down there haha... :P

Many early CD players had the same feature.

Yes standard feature for a hifi (higher end) home cd player, so must have been on a comparative feature list?

Im 50 and I was young, living on my own, and making decent money. So I got to live through all this stuff coming out. My first pc was windows 3.1. I think I had a 90mhz processor, 750mb hdd, and 4mb memory. A co worker of mine and myself really got into gaming so we were constantly trying to one up each other. He would upgrade his to 8mb memory, id run out and upgrade mine to 16. His first processor was a 75mhz, he went out and got a 120mhz "overdrive". Then I went and got a 200. Keep in mind this cost hundreds of dollars every time. I remember I had a P2B-F motherboard with a 450mhz chip and that ran everything, lasted quite a while before I had to upgrade again. I had a 14.4 modem, he got a 28.8, i got a 33.6, then we both got 56k. I went out and bought a Dell 8100 desktop AND an 8100 Inspiron at the same time, that was an expensive day. And so on. Looking back, it was awesome. Even dealing with Win95 and early Win98 blue screens, hell we didn't care. This stuff was so fun. 98SE was great, XP was better. Trying to download music from napster and just being blown away by it. Playing all the early games when they came out. Doom, Quake, Blood, ROTT, Unreal was incredible. I remember downloading south park episodes from IRC when we finally got DSL. You switched phone brands all the time and they all looked totally different from each other. xbox, ps2, we got to grow up with it basically. No parents to say no, we had money to get it. mp3 players came out, he had a Zen, I had a Sandisk. The old people at work couldn't believe music could go on those things, they thought Sony Walkman's were the only way to carry music around. Now a pc lasts years before needing an upgrade. iphones and androids look the same year after year. Nothing fun about getting a new phone really, not like then. Stuff like chatgpt and AI is cool, but there was something about those 90s and 2000s that can't be captured again I don't think.

Our shop didn’t sell Clarion but a friend’s shop did. They sold one. I think they sold more of the Clarion 32” subwoofers which were wildly impractical.

Some people wanted the highest tech available... I had one of these in each of my cars. Still have them, but not the cars I had them in.

Yes, I genuinely love the "mate in the pub" style. My favourite lessons at school were where teachers went off piste into adjacent areas I was wondering about!

Sorry - I'm now out of fun stories from my past.

​@@BigCar2What about a story about the rise and fall of the DIN "screen/display-coming-out" radios? Kind of high end HiFi car audio & sat nav lesson? 😊

@@Stefan_Dahn that somehow still decently popular in Japan lol

I had the Pharos GPS CF module for my Pocket PC. I actually used it. It was a wow thing. It could even see the satellites and their signals.

An item of note is I do not think it was until sometime in the Clinton admin that GPS became properly useful, It was under his admin that the USAF turned off the inaccuracy mode for non military GPS. Naturally to avoid politics I doubt it had anything to do with who was president and more that the late 1990s was seeing an explosion in progress in portable technology, And with the cold war nearly a decade in the rear view the computer industry pushed to get precision mode available for all.

What infuriates me is that there's Bluetooth connection but only for voice and not for music... And I'm talking about Blue and Me on a car that was produced up until 2013 haha

Does the Blue & Me System Support iPod/iPhone playback over usb?

@@BeesonsCars I think only supports non-touch iPods, but I don’t know for sure…

@@rowmaniax1998 06-11 ford focus has the same problem without the bullshit software. Why make it calls only? (Transit, mondeo, fiesta, focus any of them with the round stereo or sony one)

​@@rowmaniax1998 The Fiat 500 & Abarth 595 had blue&me all the way until late 2015!! No music via bluetooth was SO annoying, however, the voice recognition for your phone contacts worked surprisingly well.

That would be cool! Blaupunkt, Grundig, Becker, Fujitsu...even Nakamichi made some great car hifi!

@Roadbart77 Yes absolutely, those brands had some amazing car radios back in the 80s and 90s, and Phillips did too.

I still have some of the old head units from the early era- the Harmon Kardon (Traffic Pilot, I think it was called) that Lamborghini and Land Rover used, as well as the Blaupunkt that required one to have a binder of something like 20 CDR's with maps. Maybe it would be worth doing some videos of those- I tend to never throw old stereo equipment away, so have several of them stashed away.

Check out the Aston Martin Lagonda. Definitely ahead of its time.

Yeah, the Mazda Eunos Cosmo was one of the first cars to have a built-in intotainement system with touchscreen and GPS, and this way back in 1991.

buick had the best system by far, its works better than modern european infotainment systems

Physical buttons > touch screens in vehicles

Didn’t Cadillac also have a early touch screen navigation system stock in some of their cars? Sometime in the 90’s? I remember this, because of a movie from Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn The Out Of Towners remake I think. I was into sound mainly only in the 90’s. Me and my friends built sound systems in our cars for competitions. And we won multiple competitions with systems from Orion, Legacy, JBL, ect… We weren’t concerned with the head units with operating systems from windows or navigation ect.. Just custom sub enclosures and amps. Crossovers, ect.. And good, standard cd head units. So I don’t know a lot about the 90’s navigation systems. Does anyone else remember the stereo in their car in that movie? I just remember it seeming pretty advanced for the 90’s. 🤷‍♂️

That thing was awesome and again ahead of its time.

500 special editions were sold, apparently.

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is held in January every year. COMDEX used to be held in November and was more computer focused. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX

I picked one up a boxed one at a car boot sale which still had the Comet receipt in the box. I was amazed that whoever bought it paid about £90 just for the extended warranty.

SH2 , previous processor was used in Segas 32x and Saturn. Both had 2 of them.

That's the benefit of a faster CPU & memory and progress in speech recognition technology. That tech was bought in (from Nuance maybe?).

Pfft what unicorn module did you get. I have nothing but problems with mine, although when it works it does work decently. I’m all updated and everything too.

@@jackdough8164 IDK. I'm just on the Sync 2 system with the 8" display and Sony sound system. It's on the latest version that I could install myself without needing to take it to the OEM to get them to reflash it manually. It does sometimes have issues recognizing certain words, but the screen to have you select which of several options it think it heard is enough for me to forgive it. It's not very often that it gets confused.

@@BigCar2 That's the thing: when major companies come out with something revolutionary that doesn't seem to match with the rest of their products particularly well, then there's a good chance that they acquired a company that was already producing such a product and just had them integrate it.

@@mndlessdrwer I don’t have a problem with my voice control as much as I do with the thing just being a piece of crap lol. The Bluetooth is my biggest issue. Goes out of sync (ironically enough). Disconnects for no reason. Will show connected but no sound will come through. And there’s lots of times when I start the car and the only thing that will work is the am/fm radio lol. Pulling the fuse fixes the problems and I don’t lose any info or settings but it’s still a pain

Yeah, the minor league. :)

Hey Gerry! Long time no see.

I did offer to let him borrow to make a video, but it's not his cup of tea.

I talk about it in the Ford SYNC video. It's essentially v2 of Blue & Me.

Fiat blue and me modules are poorly made,I frequently replace them.

I know the graphic designer for the UI quite well. The device had 8 colours, and he specifically avoided using magenta as it wouldn't have looked good on the system, so he limited himself to 7 colours on purpose. I think he did a pretty good job, and it was one of his first jobs. He went on to help design the Microsoft copy progress bar in Windows 10.

I've thought about doing one on AutoRoute as I know the people who ran the company.

T9 wasn't really a thing. We didn't think of it. Remember we're coming from a PC background, not a phone background.

@@BigCar2 since i’m not a native english speaker i’ve basically never had the honour to use t9 “for real” but i remember typing on the regular keypads just fine :)) back then i had a becker traffic pro headunit (dont remember the time exactly) but i always thought why didnt they add some kind of way to input the address except just arrows.

@@deeiks12 Probably the software to make it happen didn´t exist at that timepoint, so even if someone thought about it - if you don´t have the means to make it happen - someone must spend time and money inventing it first. Wich somebody did at the end, but too late for this device.

Thanks for the suggestion - someone else has mentioned this. All I know is what I've put into the videos. You might appreciate a deeper dive into this issue I do in the Princess Optional Extra video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-U-yUOnNExfs.html

I'm still suffering from a system that could use a little more CPU power at work. I guess it prevents us employees from overworking ourselves.😅

Not a coincidence, it was developed by Microsoft for FIAT and runs windows CE

When you’re making something new like this you’re in a bubble where you think it’s going to set the world on fire. It’s only from a distance that you can see it from a different perspective. I’m rubbish at the technical parts of cars, so I’m not sure I’d be good at talking about their history. I did a little on my second channel (Little Car) about Turbos, windscreen wipers etc… if you’re interested.

I'd love to see the video if you do it. Let me know. I only just found that dealer video, and it was great to see the bits of the UI I couldn't get to. Brought back lots of memories.

@@BigCar2 I uploaded it on another one of my channels as I was given the VHS tape to convert to mp4 a few years ago for a friend. I’m glad this video was recommended to me now I’ll go check your other videos 👌

@@BigCar2 You worked for Microsoft? Or Clarion?

🤣🤣🤣🤣 As a dealer I remember that video.

Microsoft

The navigation is shown in the link in the pinned comment & the description. It was nice to see it again after all these years!

Well maybe if doesn't explode

Maybe, but the processor is gonna be a HUGE bottleneck, maybe less powerful then a 286

That would be tough, especially on a 256x64 screen!

@@nowind37 "Did somebody say BOOM?!"-Sandy Cheeks

😂

😀 Good to know!

Fiat "Blue & Me". See my video on Ford SYNC.

@@BigCar2 thank you!