A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX
S spd Member Joined Aug 29, 2026 Messages 12 Yesterday at 9:57 PM #1 I don't know if anybody cares about stuff like this, but I thought I'd share a quick story about a project I was hired to build back in the 90's as an embedded systems software developer. This is a project I wish I still had access to. It's something I worked on where I was asked to build a "real-time GPS-driven moving map display" -- what we simply call a "GPS" today.
- ▪S spd Member Joined Aug 29, 2026 Messages 12 Yesterday at 9:57 PM #1 I don't know if anybody cares about stuff like this, but I thought I'd share a quick story about a project I was hired to build back in the 90's as an embedded systems sof
- ▪This is a project I wish I still had access to.
- ▪It's something I worked on where I was asked to build a "real-time GPS-driven moving map display" -- what we simply call a "GPS" today.
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| Original publisher | Vintage Computer Federation Forums |
| Canonical URL | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/a-software-thing-i-built-gps-on-a-25mhz-486-sx.1258966/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:43:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T08:08:41.384Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T08:08:41.384Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | tIWDVyx0gyjm · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
S spd Member Joined Aug 29, 2026 Messages 12 Yesterday at 9:57 PM #1 I don't know if anybody cares about stuff like this, but I thought I'd share a quick story about a project I was hired to build back in the 90's as an embedded systems software developer. This is a project I wish I still had access to. It's something I worked on where I was asked to build a "real-time GPS-driven moving map display" -- what we simply call a "GPS" today. Only today it's built into virtually every cellphone and tablet computer in the world. I was asked to write this software so it ran on a hardware platform with a 25MHz 486-SX CPU, 32MB of RAM and the software would be in ROM. IIRC, the screen display was 1024x768. They gave me a laptop configured like that for testing.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Vintage Computer Federation Forums.