I bought an airplane with a Northstar LORAN … I loved the thing. I bought another for my other airplane but LORAN went away. Too bad. What I liked about them was that they had dual processors in them. Anyhow … now I have a pile of 'em holding the doors open in my hangar 
One other thing that Garmin “did right” is to use industrial design engineers to make their products appealing to the eye. Back in the 1970’s King used an industrial design firm in Wichita. Garmin went one step better and brought industrial design in-house. Garmin has a small talented group of industrial design engineers in Olathe for all their products and it shows.
“BendixKing never seemed to.”
Short-sighted, unimaginative.
Well run companies can afford some back-room doodling, Boeing was in the 1970s when sales were slow - leading to the common flight deck on fuselages of different diameter: 757 and 767.
An extreme case was the ‘just harvest’ mentality at one time in the company that made GPWS into something - United Control/Sundstrand Data Control/AlliedSignal/…
Fortunately some people in corners were figuring out how to enhance GPWS with map data, hence EGPWS which is standard today.
All of the above. Great article about visionaries in avionics. Somehow I feel as part of GARMIN’s history as I had a bunch of their portables and panel mounted boxes. I instructed on the G1000s from their beginnings, however I still consider the 400/500 series as the most efficient units. The GNS430W being my favorite.
Garmin did have teething pains. Our Mooney M20J had one of the first GNS 430s installed and we were some of the first pilots to fly GPS approaches. I remember flying a GPS approach to Waterbury Oxford when course guidance provided by the GNS 430 just stopped. It was supposed to transition to the FAF but no amount of prodding could get the GNS 430 to establish the final approach course. Fortunately we were practicing in VFR conditions. The hypothesis was that the GNS had trouble with three airspaces that were transited during the approach. We submitted a bug to Garmin and a month or so later an upgrade was issued. The field upgrade process is a major advance pioneered by Garmin and contributed to their success. My guess is the other avionics manufactures never dreamed of upgrading in the field. It was “not a thing”. In this era of OTA upgrades, we forget how novel field upgrades were at the time.
Amazingly I bought one of the first Garmin moving maps that showed up in the market in 1994, nothing compared to today’s like my 496. But it got the job done of getting me across the Caribbean and back, also at the time when the US was jamming the GPS signals due to the invasion of Haiti that was taking place at that time. It was a brick, literally, soon after I finished my trip, I sold the unit because one day I went to fly, I pressed the go to button and realized, I need to get back to basics. I did not get another moving map until 2000 when I got my instrument rating and realized the value of a moving map for situational and positional awareness. Great article on Garmin.
WHAT was corrected ???
That’s what is getting me through my instrument training. Not the most user friendly interface, definitely showing it’s age, but once you learn the secret handshakes it works very well.
The trick is to do the secret handshakes under the hood, getting bounced, and not screwing up control heading and altitude!
Yes, don’t tease us like this! What was the correction?
Garmin said the 20-20 on engineers wasn’t true. It was still an apocryphal story that circulated at the time.
Shutting down Loran-C was among the dumbest things the Obama administration ever did.
I LOVE it when you use “Big” words on us … 
With the blemish in SDC/AS of trying to shut others out of the market, losing in court eventually.
And there was the big US airline that locked up the first few years of production of the Boeing 247 airliner. Which motivated its competition to take a chance on Donald Douglas, who developed what became the renowned DC-3 that eclipsed the 247.
Then Douglas got timid, avoiding making a twin out of the DC-10, to compete with the A300. (Douglas made presentations to airlines but did not proceed to develop the twin by removing the center engine and redoing the tail.)
Elon ‘The Mouth 2’ Musk now has a maxim - in my words "Fixit! don’t fiddle around.’
Challenge is to make the fix wel and not foul something else up, testing takes time.
There are techniques in software to help, modulization and object-oriented programming come to mind.
Ayup, like spell-checking. :-o)
Yes, it titillates the senses.
Rediez!
Apparently the Chinese haven’t figured out the concept of controlled reentry. Maybe they should hire SpaceX to teach them how to land their boosters.
Dang! I balked when they were selling insurance policies for the SkyLab reentry.
Won’t be landing a stage like this anytime soon. Best they could conceivably do is upgrade it to perform a controlled re-entry to burn-up in a safe, predictable location.