6 CONVERGENCE: 1995–2015

During the first decade after the Global Positioning System achieved its full operational capability, from 1995 to 2005, it found increasing use among the branches of the military, scientists, surveyors, and recreational hikers and boaters. For the second decade, from 2005 to 2015, it burst into public consciousness and found uses hardly imagined by its creators. That second decade also saw an effort by Russia to improve its Soviet-era GLONASS system and by the European Union, China, India, and Japan to accelerate their own satellite navigation systems. To understand why that happened, we need to go back 40 years to the mid-1970s, when GPS was first conceived, to examine the technological context of that invention.