We had a really early one in the 90s, like way earlier than anyone else we knew, in a car we bought from some rich guy. We only used it once or twice as a novelty as my Dad always insisted he knew better. Plus it had its maps loaded up using some CD which was really out of date and it wasn’t like you could type in McDonalds and it would take you to the closest one, you had to put the whole address in and even then I think it wouldn’t find it half the time.

The first one I got was a gift in the 00s and it was bloody awful. Once I t turned me off a perfectly straight road to drive through a graveyard and then put me back on the road I had been on. Another time it turned me off and sent me down the only toll-road in the UK, then got me off at the first exit and put me back on the toll-road in the opposite direction to get me off at the place I’d got into it earlier. I had to pay twice to go nowhere and it added five minutes to my journey.

Just to add, when people came round our house in the late 90s my Dad would make me turn on the computer to show them MS Autoroute, which was an offline piece of software that was used to generate routes, basically what Google Maps does now with directions, but it would just give you something to print out. Really useful for the day and you could even get it to estimate how much the fuel would cost, etc.