CD-ROM REVIEW: GLOBAL EXPLORER Delorme Mapping 1994 Recently I reviewed MAP'N'GO, Delorme Mapping's travel planning and highway routing package. I also received their GLOBAL EXPLORER which provided me with another good reason to justify the cost of my CD drive. I managed to spend over five hours in one sitting playing with this fascinating global mapping program. GLOBAL EXPLORER offers indexed references to more than 140,000 places, including seamless full color maps of the whole world showing detailed topographic detail, major highways, political boundaries, bodies of water and street maps of 100 major cities. There are fifteen levels of magnification which allows you to "zoom" in and out showing a whole-world view or close-up with incredible detail. You can also "pan" the map to any other location easily and quickly with just the click of your mouse. In addition to the mapping database, there is a gazetteer interface that helps you explore the world, searching by country or category, providing descriptions of 20,000 of the most interesting historical, cultural, geographical and social aspects of the world. You can call up descriptions of over 100 different categories of features by selecting icons displayed on the maps. Also included are informational profiles with up-to-date information on the geographic, political, economic and demographic data of any country that interests you. The Streets interface was of particular interest - and the Street Find feature. Once you are in a city that has street data, and there are 100 major cities in this category, activate the Streets Find function and type in a few letters of the street name - you will be shown a scrolling list of streets with the letter combination you entered. Select the correct street name and click on Locate. That's all there is to it. Also the Airnet feature is neat - the database contains the world's commercial scheduled airline routes and will display these between any two points on earth, showing you (in black) a couple of different options. The Itinerary box shows you departure location, destination and all intermediate airports. If either the starting or ending point do not have a commercial airport the program will draw a line (in blue) to the nearest one and add the mileage to the itinerary. Its truly amazing! GLOBAL EXPLORER comes with limited print capabilities which allow you to copy the current detailed map to the Windows clipboard as a bitmap file which will include any air routes and Gazetteer symbols but not any of the text descriptions. Futhermore, the single-user license agreement terms contain certain paper and tangible media copy limitations which accord you the right to make map printouts only for personal and in-house business or institutional purposes. So if you plan to make use of GLOBAL EXPLORER for any other use, better contact Delorme Mapping at 800-452-5931 directly and ask. "Street" price is around $59.00. Delorme maintains a World Wide Web Home Page (www.delorme.com) which is fun to access and browse. System requirements are: 386 or higher computer, 4 MB RAM, 3 MB hard disk space, DOS v4.01 or higher, MicroSoft Windows 3.1, CD-ROM drive, VGA, and a mouse. I found GLOBAL EXPLORER to be fun and very informative - a valuable addition to my personal library of "factual" CD-ROMs. I can see myself referring to it often. It definitely belongs in every home and school library as a primary reference tool. %T GLOBAL EXPLORER %I Delorme Mapping %C Freeport Maine %D 1994 %O CD-ROM world atlas %G ISBN: 0-89933-952-2 %K world atlas, cartography, mapping (C) 1995 Michael Crestohl Nahant Massachusetts USA mc@shore.net DISCLAIMER: I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in the success or failure of the book or materials reviewed herewith, nor have I received any compensation (other than a review copy requested by me) from anyone who has. All opinions expressed are strictly my own. Other Internet and Aviation book/software reviews by me can be obtained by anonymous FTP from: x2ftp.oulu.fi in the /pub/books/crestohl directory.