Not much later, and with its own completely different tech for auto navigation, came the Etak Navigator / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak. A good bit of SV history there.
The helium-gas rate gyroscope [1] is very strange. Honda's history says that it was built because it had only eight parts. It's a helium jet aimed at a pair of hot-wire anemometers. It wasn't a very good rate gyro, but it was cheap.
Etak had a rate gyro with a motor spinning a flexible metal disk, with the flexing sensed capacitively. I still have one of those somewhere. That was simple and cheap too, but still not very good. All these things had far more drift than even low end modern IC gyros.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] threadThese tended to be made into an almost straight line and printed on a single piece of paper with notable junctions and features only.
It would've been obvious at the time that the format would be ideal for fixed routes that these could be scrolled.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825
Etak had a rate gyro with a motor spinning a flexible metal disk, with the flexing sensed capacitively. I still have one of those somewhere. That was simple and cheap too, but still not very good. All these things had far more drift than even low end modern IC gyros.
[1] http://world.honda.com/history/challenge/1981navigationsyste...