Where Were You When

Most of us remember vividly where we were on September 11, 2001. In my case, I was in Danbury, Connecticut in the board room at Bristol Technology meeting with their CEO, Keith Blackwell. Remember where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy was assassinated? Or maybe when Jerry Garcia died if you are too young to remember JFK. There were many memorable dates. Here are a handful of famous ones:

Attack on Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1941 

D-Day, Normandy invasion – June 6, 1944 

Assassination of JFK – November 22, 1963 

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – April 4, 1968 

Moon landing – July 20, 1969 

Challenger disaster – January 28, 1986 

Fall of the Berlin Wall – November 9, 1989 

9/11 attacks – September 11, 2001 

Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting – December 14, 2012 

Capitol Riot – January 6, 2021 

Russian invasion of Ukraine – February 24, 2022 

George Floyd’s death and subsequent protests – May 25, 2020 

COVID-19 pandemic declaration – March 2020 

Taliban takeover of Afghanistan – August 15, 2021 

Most of us remember major events and exactly where we were at the time — even if it was decades before. Things like that you just don’t forget. But do you remember exactly where you were? I mean the exact latitude and longitude. I didn’t remember the JFK location either; that is until I went back to Lehigh University for my 30th reunion with my handheld GPS receiver and captured the precise coordinates. A nearby building had been torn down and a new one constructed, but dead reckoning got me to the right spot. It was on the Lehigh football field where my colleagues in the marching band and I were assembling to rehearse for the upcoming game. This might have seemed strange in 1995 when I wrote the first version of this story but I stood on the precise spot at Lehigh where I was when JFK was assassinated. The news was shocking for all of us.

There are so many occasions when time and place get recorded. We take it for granted. Auto accidents, package deliveries, construction sites, interviews, meetings and events of all kinds. We capture the time with great precision; e.g. Saturday July 4, 1998 at 2:15 PM. At times, we also record the location: e.g. IBM Corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York. We could be much more precise, however. How about N41° 06.774′, W73° 43.043′ (41 degrees, 6.774 minutes north and 73 degrees, 43.043 minutes west).

Location (place) awareness has been an integral part of the history of mankind and the development of modern society. We don’t give it much thought, but location and navigation are inextricable parts of how us humans operate. Most of us have a built-in ability to find our way around using “dead reckoning”, commonly used in maritime, aviation, and land navigation when GPS or other navigation aids aren’t available.

Since the beginning of time, sailors noticed stars provide a handy reference where landmarks are not available. Polynesians were able to travel great distances to tiny islands using only wind, waves, and the stars with nothing more significant than the width of an outstretched hand or finger. To study navigation and location is to study Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, Byrd, Armstrong, and Aldrin and Collins who made Apollo 13’s famous “Earth limb shot”. Not to mention the scientists who made it possible. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Huygens, Fourier, Newton, Morley, Einstein, Marconi, Mercator, Euler, and Gauss just to name a few.

Trade, commerce, and free societies are not possible without location awareness. In a sense it is the very essence of our being. Primarily because of the different availabilities of technology we were able to have time awareness long before we had location awareness even though the two are so intimately tied together. GPS technology closed the gap. Consumers began using GPS in the early 1980s, but widespread access to accurate GPS for civilian use became available in the year 2000.

Over time we will start to think of the precision of place as being just as important as the precision of time. Starting now and into the future there will be no uncertainty about when and where somebody meant when they refer to location information; especially with the advent of incredible GPS devices such as those coming out of Garmin and Magellan and now in our cars and smartphones. In 1995 when I wrote this, it was amazing devices to have powerful handheld GPS computers. They could capture your precise location very quickly, tell you your speed and direction, store routes and hundreds of waypoints and enable you to back-track over a course to the starting point or points along the way.

In 1995, I predicted the advent of smaller and smaller silicon germanium chips would make embedded GPS capabilities closer than most of us were aware. I explained what exactly the physical makeup of a GPS receiver was. They have a microprocessor chip set of some kind, navigation keys, display, and an antenna. Which of these does a cell phone have? How about a camera? In 1995, I predicted these non-GPS devices would be able to capture a conversation or a picture and supplement the data with a person’s precise latitude and longitude. Imagine, I speculated, if every camera had a GPS capability in it. Once this happens there will no longer be a question as to the legitimacy of certain pictures that depict something which happened — whether it is an accident of some kind or a special event. You might even cryptographically sign the picture plus the coordinates with your digital certificate and thereby establish authentication and non-repudiation of the event. Or imagine you find yourself lost in an unfamiliar city but since you have your portable phone with you with a digital readout, it can point you to the nearest library, ATM machine or hospital. Later, a company announced a mobile phone for Muslims with a built-in pointer to Mecca.

It seemed to me back then we were about to enter an age where an explosion of new data is going to be generated. All of it will find its way into databases, Web servers, new applications and be available for user access. I said it was part of the fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted world upon us.

Epilogue: This post is an edited version of a story I wrote in 1995.
Copyright: John R. Patrick 1995 2003 2011 2013 2024