MapQuest
Before your phone knew where you were, you printed directions from MapQuest and prayed you didn't miss step 14. The pre-GPS road-trip ritual, in a stack of warm printer paper.
Before the phone in your pocket knew exactly where you were, there was MapQuest. Launched in 1996 as the first commercial web mapping service, it turned the road trip into a ritual: type in your start and destination, hit print, and carry a stack of numbered turn-by-turn directions in the car — praying you didn't miss step 14 or hit unexpected construction.
It became the default way Americans found their way, and AOL bought it in a deal worth about $1.1 billion that closed in 2000. For most of the pre-smartphone era, 'MapQuest it' was simply how you got directions to a party, a new job, or a friend's house three towns over.
Google Maps arrived in 2005, but the real exodus came around 2008, as smartphones and in-car GPS made printed directions obsolete almost overnight. MapQuest never fully died — it still runs today — but its heyday, and the very specific dread of the misfolded printout, belongs to the 2000s.
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