In 1982 Charlie Trimble, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, paid Hewlett-Packard $80,000 for the remains of a canceled engineering project-shelves full of research notes, and the result of that research: a circuit board the size of a coffee table. The circuit board could pick up a signal from the first satellite in what would eventually become the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), a ring of 24 military satellites orbiting 18,000 kilometers above the earth.

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