Happy Birthday to us. TidBITS is officially one year old and what better way to celebrate (OK, so we can think of a few) than by reporting the results of our TidBITS Survey. We ran the survey in December and still receive occasional responses, although the majority arrived in the first month or two. What took us so long? Data entry. It's time consuming, a lot of work, and boring beyond belief, even though we could just copy from QuickMail and paste into Double Helix. If we had figured out some method of getting everyone to return answers in exactly the same format, we could have had Nisus clean it all up. Maybe for next year's TidBITS Anniversary.

As far as the organization of this issue goes, we'll talk a bit about year-end numbers, the statistics we gathered from the survey (and do remember Mark Twain's dictum "There are three sorts of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics."), and then we'll list a bunch of the responses we got to different categories and our comments on those responses.

This issue is a lot to read at once, being over 60K of text, and since it's not like the timely news we normally report on, feel free to read at your leisure. If you think 50K is a lot, though, we got well over 700K of email responses and 20 snail mail responses that we typed into Double Helix manually.