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