This combination of business data and route optimization was a success within sales departments. The software would identify roads that were under construction and provide information on how to avoid them. The most impressive feature was Streets and Trips’ ability to update route information in real time. With an extremely user-friendly interface for its time, Microsoft Streets and Trips featured ground-breaking technology that contained more than six million miles of map. In later versions, it introduced features we are familiar with like weather considerations, traffic monitoring and construction updates. Now discontinued, it was a computer program that mapped out streets, businesses and places of interest - as well as displayed pins on a map and built multi-stop routes from place to place. Microsoft Streets and Trips was a mapping and routing program that helped lay the foundation for personal GPS systems. ġ4 years later, it suddenly disappeared from the market. In the late 90s, it was acquired by Microsoft and distributed in North America as Streets and Trips in 2000. Massively popular, it was eventually downloaded by half of the computers in the UK. This not just revolutionized personal navigation - it transformed the way industries like field sales operated.īut before Waze, Google Maps, and even TomTom existed - there were five friends from Surrey, England that built an overnight success software called Autoroute. With the introduction of MapQuest in 1996, online personal mapping slowly became accessible to the public. It’s 2022 and nearly everyone has access to a personal GPS on their mobile device - but let’s not forget that digital maps are a recent invention.

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