Engineer Recalls NAVTEQ Mapping Days: 2TB Drives in Trunks, SIFT Features
yunta_tsai · x · 2026-10-07
The author recalls working with NAVTEQ on mapping: data-collection cars carried 3.5-inch 2TB drives (over 2 lb each) or 2.5-inch 1TB models, I/O bandwidth was under 3 Gb/s requiring elaborate RAID setups, and cooling was so bad that unloading drives felt like pulling bread from an oven.
Back then SIFT features were the ML frontier, GPUs only rendered offline results while CPUs did the compute — yet the trajectory toward vector-space search and learnable embeddings was already visible.
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