REVIEW: CD-ROM - STREET ATLAS USA 2.0 Delorme Mapping 1993 This is truly amazing stuff - imagine a search engine and database on a single CD-ROM that contains every street in the entire country - right down to the remotest back-roads and displays them in your choice of 13 different magnification levels. To give you an idea of just how detailed the highest mag level is, if you printed out all of STREET ATLAS USA at that level the finished seamless map would cover more than ten football fields! You can search the database in several ways - by name of a city and state, telephone area code and exchange or ZIP code. You can also locate areas of interest by panning and zooming. STREET ATLAS USA database contains more than 12 million street segments and 1.1 million geographic and man-made features! It shows city, town, street and highway names, natural features and topography features such as rivers, lakes, elevation, etc as well as man-made landmarks such as railroads and prominent buildings. In the larger urban areas the program will display the street address ranges, a particularly useful feature. The direct printing function allows you to print high-quality color or B&W seamless maps at different scales on any Windows-supported printer. There is some flexibility in selecting the user interface - either the STREET ATLAS USA panel or the standard Windows interface. The Delorme interface is very easy to use. You can easily resize maps and call up the legend at any time. STREET ATLAS USA is very popular - it spent a remarkable 18 months on the top ten CD-ROM list and is the only program of this type I have seen. The Limited License allows for non-commercial use on a single-user system and its best to read the license terms and conditions if you're contemplating anything else. Fortunately, STREET ATLAS USA has a bigger brother, MAP EXPERT 2.0 available at a higher cost but with many more features and different licensing terms that may be more suitable for commercial use. I will review MAP EXPERT 2.0 in the very near future and will compare the two programs and their respective licensing agreements. I had a ball with STREET ATLAS USA! It took less than 30 minutes of playing to become proficient with the built-in interface. I spent over four hours (much to my wife's chagrin) visiting old haunts, checking out familiar neighborhoods, towns and other places I know. I even checked out a (fairly) new housing development in Swampscott MA and it was there! The database was more up-to-date than I expected. I have reviewed two other Delorme Mapping software products and I found STREET ATLAS USA to be just as impressive as MAP'N'GO and GLOBAL EXPLORER but not surprising for a Delorme Mapping product. %T STREET ATLAS USA 2.0 %I Delorme Mapping %C Freeport Maine %D 1993 %O CD-ROM, average price $79.00 %G ISBN:0-89933-953-0 %K mapping, streets, (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.