In the 90's, I was hired as an embedded systems developer to build a real-time GPS-driven moving map display on a 25MHz 486-SX CPU with 32MB of RAM and a 1024x768 display. The 486-SX lacked a math co-processor, which was a problem since GIS math relied heavily on floating-point trig formulas.

A Dr. Dobb's Journal article introduced me to Hipparchus, a library from Geodesy using Voronoi Cells that reduced most math to 8- and 16-bit integer calculations. It outperformed extended-precision floating point. I built a prototype, had the client purchase the library, and delivered a fully-working model.

The client hit financial trouble and I surrendered everything. Someone later contacted me to replicate it, but as a contractor I didn't own the IP. I wasn't aware of clean-room approaches like Phoenix Technologies used for BIOS, which courts upheld in 1989.

This was 5 years before consumer GPS devices from Garmin or Magellan appeared. My system was twice as fast as first-gen devices, updating a color display every 2 seconds. It took 10 years for consumer GPS to match that performance without a math co-processor. Those early devices had tiny 360x240 monochrome screens.