Artifact Details

Title

Trimble, Charles oral history

Catalog Number

102717378

Type

Moving image

Description

GPS was intended to be a dual-use military and civilian system. The fact that the civilian applications would spawn a major global industry was not anticipated. Charlie Trimble was among the first commercial GPS developers. His oral history is the story of how marketing a corrected latitude/longitude readout for LORAN-C navigation fixes led to the founding of Trimble Navigation in 1978 and a reinvention of the surveying industry. Both the Trimble LORAN-C and an early GPS breadboard were projects that Charlie Trimble’s former employer, Hewlett Packard, chose not to continue. His oral history includes technology innovation, disaster recovery, high-level political intrigue, and misunderstandings of the time-bandwidth product in a competition for scarce radio frequency allocations that persist to this day.

Date

2018-09-25

Participants

Rino, Charles, Interviewer
Trimble, Charles, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Duration

01:32:21

Format

MOV

Category

Oral history

Collection Title

CHM Oral History

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8786.2019
 

Related Records

102717377 Trimble, Charles oral history