Oral History of Stan Honey

Interviewed by Charles Rino on 2018-05-24 in Mountain View, CA X8646.2018
© Computer History Museum

As a professional navigator, Stan Honey holds numerous awards for yacht races across the Pacific, and the speed record for sailing around the world. As an innovator and businessman, he co-founded the company ETAK and led the development at ETAK of the first practical autonomous automotive navigation system. The ETAK Navigator predated the GPS systems we know today but introduced the rotating map and map-matching approaches that are used universally by vehicle navigation systems today. He led the development of the first real-time augmentation of sports television with the “glowing hockey puck.” This led to his co-founding of the company Sportvision, where he led the development of the football first-and-ten line, the baseball strike zone, and the augmented NASCAR race viewing. He later led the group that developed the LiveLine system, which overlaid geo-position lines and data streams on live race-course video of the 2013 America’s Cup race. In this oral history Stan presents an inciteful review of his career, which touches every aspect of computer history. He discusses acquiring entrepreneurial support and building a team of experts to execute the project, including executives. He is a skilled engineer himself with a passion for technical problem solving. In his own words, as an executive in Rupert Murdoc’s News Corp, he had to find a technical development project to “stay sane.” That project led to augmented reality, but the project long predated that terminology. In the same vein, Stan recognized that decision making with unreliable data as a competitive navigator was the same decision-making process as that done by corporate executives. The difference is the performance criteria, time to the finish line versus profit maximization. Stan’s story a refreshing complement to Silicon Valley history.

Lot number: X8646.2018
Catalog number: 102738798