If it feels like GPS has been around forever, that's because it has. Well, at least the human brain-powered version. People have been making their way around the world—with and without maps—for ages. It is a true survival instinct. It has been just a few decades since humans outsourced their wayfinding to global navigation satellite systems.
Outsourcing navigation to GPS The use of GPS supplants some of the functions of the hippocampus, an area of the brain in the temporal lobe that supports episodic and relational memory as well as spatial navigation, spatial memory, and mental mapping. The second technique was a stimulus-response strategy, where a person learned to move habitually because of stimuli, like knowing they had to turn left when they saw pyramids. This kind of wayfinding relies more on the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain that is also responsible for learning habits such as riding a bicycle. This type of learning, however, is a kind of autopilot and doesn't allow for too much change.
These allocentric navigation tools—with information presented in relation to other landmarks in an environment—pushed the species forward; before maps, sailors used the sky to navigate, finding the sun, stars, and planets and staying within sight of the shoreline. The rise and price of GPS A similarly indispensable advance came centuries later. During the Cold War, the United States Department of Defense first iterated GPS. Eleven satellites were launched from 1978 to 1985, and the system became fully operational with its 24th satellite in 1993.