Back To the Future: Autonomous Driving In 1995

First time accepted submitter stowie writes This autonomous Pontiac Trans Sport minivan that drove 3,000 miles was built over about a four-month time frame for under $20,000. "We had one computer, the equivalent of a 486DX2 (look that one up), a 640x480 color camera, a GPS receiver, and a fiber-optic gyro. It's funny to think that we didn't use the GPS for position, but rather to determine speed. In those days, GPS Selective Availability was still on, meaning you couldn't get high-accuracy positioning cheaply. And if you could, there were no maps to use it with! But, GPS speed was better than nothing, and it meant we didn't have to wire anything to the car hardware, so we used it."

Comments

Re:don't need to look it up

[HBI]

The original 486DX was released in 1989 and ran at 20mhz. It included a FPU, previously an add-on coprocessor on x86 chips.

Then, the 486SX was released, which disabled the FPU and was offered at speeds as slow as 16mhz.

The 486DX topped out at 50mhz, but then on-chip clock doubling was offered as the 486DX2, raising speeds up to 66mhz. Then clock tripling, finishing up at 100mhz with the 486DX4.

Earlier boxes had turbo buttons because they could shift back into a nominally PC/PC/XT compatible 4.77mhz (in the case of 8088/8086 boxes) or PC/AT compatible 6 or 8mhz (in the case of 286/386 boxes). It actually had a good reason - many early games were highly dependent on the system's clock speed.