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Karen Nakamura is the original author of the GPSy® and GPSy Pro™ software. She is a veteran Macintosh and Rhapsody programmer with over 18 years experience in C/C++ programming and was one of the first NeXTStep programmers when it was released in 1989. First released in 1997, GPSy and GPSy Pro were developed out of fieldwork tools in her anthropology dissertation project analyzing deaf communities in the United States and Japan. In her other life, she is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. This is her spiel:
"My first computer was actually an old Digital mainframe at the Australian
National University in Canberra. This was well over twenty years ago when I was
still in grade school. My parents were both doctoral fellows and too poor
to be able to afford a baby sitter, so I spent a lot of hours logging in
games of Wumpus on an old TTY machine. Terminals with cathode ray tubes were
too precious to let a 6 year old around.
"Next were some Texas Instrument 100s that were seeded to my elementary school
in Boston. Then, in Tokyo we were using Commodore-64s in middle-school. The
Mac had just come out in Japan in 1985 when I was in high school, but I wasn't
able to afford one so I bought an Apple //c instead. I began programming in
earnest then. My major effort was Cassandra -- a scheduling PIM (Greek scholars
should appreciate the name of the program, I was a 6th year Latin student)
written in Aztec C. The program took over 2 hours to compile and I had to
flip the 5" floppies over during the compilation process... I read a lot
of science fiction during that period...
"I went to Cornell for college -- one of the reasons for choosing Cornell was that
they were a seed site for the NeXT Computer. I borrowed $5000 from my parents
and bought a NeXT Cube (serial #1058) and for a while was the only independent
student developer on the East Coast. There, I attracted the attention of one
of NeXT's Vice-Presidents when I released Cassandra for the NeXT. He seeded me
with Developer Tools and hardware -- and put me in touch with Canon, Japan.
"Canon was at that time NeXT's major partner, and their sales outlet in Japan.
I interned at Canon in the summer of 1990 and developed the IX-SCANS package
for them, the kernel for the Canon Still Video Floppy and driver software for
the Canon Magnetic Optical SCSI system. I wrote the SCSI Base Class for
NeXTSTEP. Later, I became one of the co-publishers and co-editors of NeXTWatch
and released the SCSI Suite: SCSI SpeedGun and SCSI Formatter for NeXTSTEP.
"By the time I was ready to graduate, I was having serious doubts about entering
the corporate world. I didn't enjoy programming for corporations that much --
their schedules, meetings, and top-down dictates seemed to dampen my feelings
of creativity and the jouissance for programming. Instead, I sold my NeXT Cubes,
GNU copylefted all of my NeXTSTEP software, quit my job at NeXTWatch and the company
I was consulting for, and entered graduate school instead. Isn't avoiding real life
why everyone goes to graduate school?
"As it turns out, you can take the programmer away from the computer, but not
for very long. I became interested in GPS technology in the Fall of 1996. Working
with GPS units fits in with my love of low-level systems programming as nothing
was more enjoyable than working with the SCSI bus, V-BOX (LAN-L) and other
toys with the NeXT. I'm looking forward to creating the best GPS software on
any platform -- exclusively for the Macintosh and Rhapsody OSes."
Tom Saxton is the newest addition to the GPSy development team. Living in Seattle, Washington, Tom handled the immense job of porting GPSy to Mac OS X and has been leading development since then.
Our beautiful GPSy and GPSy Pro application splash screens were done by the Dutch artist and celestial cartographer Andreas Cellarius as part of his Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonica Macrocosmica published in 1661. We think his artwork represents the golden age of the symbiosis between the visual arts and the physical sciences and are proud to use them with our applications.
Global Mapping Systems was incorporated in 2000 to distribute high-quality GPS and GIS software for the Apple Macintosh platform. Although our primary business registration is in New York City; our business location and presence is more properly the Internet as most of our business is conducted through the online web site (http://www.gpsy.com) and extensive online user-support system.
Order and sales related inquiries should be directed to
while technical support inquiries
should be directed to
.
We do not currently offer sales or technical assistance over the phone.
Copyright (C) 1997-2007 by Karen Nakamura. All rights reserved. GPSy® and GPSy.COM® are registered trademarks and GPSy ProTM and GPSyLinkTM are trademarks of Karen Nakamura. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Mention of a third-party's product does not represent endorsement of or by that product.
This page was last updated on Jan 21, 2007.
We've had hits since
February 4th, 1998.