Etak, Inc. was an independent US-based vendor of automotive navigation system equipment, digital maps, and mapping software. It was founded in 1983. Its original headquarters were in Sunnyvale, but the company later moved to 1430 O'Brien Drive (View on OpenStreetMap) in Menlo Park, California. The company finally ceased to exist under the name "Etak" shortly after its acquisition by Tele Atlas in 2000. In its time, it was a pioneer in commercializing automotive navigation systems and digital mapping, technologies that have since entered the mainstream. Founding of the Company Etak's initial start-up funding came from Nolan Bushnell, famous for starting Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. "[Co-founder Stan Honey] was doing military-related research at SRI International in 1983 when he sailed with Pong inventor and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell to victory in a Transpac race. Bushnell was impressed with Honey's navigational electronics and asked whether he had any other ideas. Honey suggested a car navigation system. Bushnell gave him $500,000 in seed money, and digital-mapping firm Etak (named after a Polynesian term for navigation) was born." Etak's Navigator was the first commercially available automotive navigation system of any practical significance. Etak initially delivered the hardware system, the maps and dynamic content for its automotive navigation system. Early Etak product literature claimed that "Etak" was an ancient Polynesian term that described navigating intuitively by the stars. Etak Navigator Etak's initial product, the Navigator, was introduced in 1985. This system was the precursor to today's GPS-based automotive navigation systems, many of which trace a direct line of descent to Etak's technology. The original Etak Navigator was a specially-packaged Intel 8088-based system with 256K RAM, 32K EPROM, 2K SRAM, and a cassette tape drive on which digital maps and some of the operating system were stored. The tapes could not hold much information, so for the Los Angeles area, for example, three to four tapes were required. When an edge of the map was reached, the driver needed to change cassette tapes to continue benefitting from the accuracy of map-matching. The system had a tape drive that was designed to be installed within easy reach of the driver, so this could be done while driving. The map moved on the screen as the car was driven, but instead of the color raster graphics display of today's systems it had a green vector display. The Navigator had address geocoding (the ability to