A folded map on the passenger seat is from the past and narrated driving directions by a computer is the present. In between came various gadgets designed to help drivers get to where they were going. Among them is Iter Auto, an Italian invention from the 1930s. It consists of a paper scroll identifying waymarkers along a popular driving route.
Place the appropriate scroll in a machine which is hooked into the car's speedometer. It scrolled automatically to match the pace of the car.
I found this information on Tangible Media, a marvelous online museum of various forms of historic physical media organized according to a well considered taxonomy.
-via David Thompson
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