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Space: A Visual History of Manned Spaceflight, 2nd Edition
by Reviewed by Steven Breitbart — NOCCC. - July 02, 1999 at 00:25:05:
I grew up watching America’s attempt to reach the moon. Space: A Visual History, 2nd Edition, by Sumeria, Inc. is an almanac of American space missions from Mercury to the Space Shuttle and captures the spirit of those times. It is also quite current, the revision I had was about one year old and it contained information about the shuttle mission which went up in August 1997.There are lots of good movies and still photographs included on this CD-ROM. All of the movies and still photographs included have been captured from NASA’s Film and Video library, which is in the public domain and can be used without restriction in any product or service. The text can be exported for “unlimited non-commercial re-use.” However, it is not an encyclopedia or a technical manual. Several groups of astronauts are mentioned including the original seven chosen for project Mercury, the astronauts who landed on the moon, and the crews that died on Apollo 1 and on the Challenger. I would like to have seen a list of the astronauts who were on each flight.
From the main menu, you can go to a section about individual space projects such as Gemini and the Space Shuttle, or Science and Technology, which has sub-sections about Space-based Science, Life in Space and Spacewalks. You can also access these topics from a timeline or the index. You can export text, which exports the whole section, export a movie, or print a screen consisting of text and one movie frame.
Requirements — The minimum requirements for IBM-compatible computers are Windows 95 (a 486DX with a 100 MHz CPU is recommended). Also 16MB of available RAM, a Sound Blaster compatible card and a VGA or better display set to High Color (16 bit) at 64O x 48O resolution. For Macintosh computers, the minimum requirements are a Power Macintosh with a minimum of 16MB of RAM, System 7.0 and a 13-inch monitor. It will not run on Macintosh 6800 machines. Both types of computers need at least a 4X CD-ROM drive.
Installation was easy. QuickTime 3.0, which is required for playing movies, is included. It installed right over an older version that was already in the PC. The software performed well with a 6x CD-ROM drive. Just before writing this review, I installed a 40x CD-ROM, which improved the images a small amount.
Problems—I had a few problems with Space. Windows 95’s 3D mouse pointers were not visible on all areas of the screen; changing back to the standard pointers fixed this problem. There are many screens about each space project; you can go forward and back, but you can’t go to a specific page or to the beginning or end. Many of the movies are apparently narrated by one of the astronauts, but there is no mention of who is doing the talking. When I exported a movie, and then tried to play the MOV file using QuickTime by itself, a 3" x 3" purple square was displayed, this square did nothing. Surprisingly, reducing the size of the square about 1/8-inch caused the picture to appear. I informed Sumeria about some of these problems, but they didn’t respond to my e-mail.
Space: A Visual History, 2nd Edition sells for about $30 and is a good value. Sumeria, Inc. is located in San Francisco, their phone number is (415) 904-0800 and their web site is www.sumeria.com.
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