36 Years and 1800 Issues of TidBITS
As of this issue, TidBITS is celebrating 36 years of continuous publication, and amusingly, our sequential issue numbering simultaneously hit an even 1800. The human brain does so love numerical coincidence.
Whenever one of these anniversaries rolls around, I look back at what I’ve written in previous years to make sure whatever I say won’t repeat the same point. What I said about modeling the behavior you would like to see in the world in “Staying the Course After 35 Years of TidBITS” (18 April 2025) still holds. “34 Years of TidBITS and New Mac App Discounts for Members” (15 April 2024) was more of a numerical checkpoint, but its focus on the growth and importance of TidBITS Talk remains relevant. And while I have refined my thinking about AI since I wrote “33 Years of TidBITS: Handcrafted Content from Humans” (17 April 2023), I still can’t imagine how an AI could write from lived experience, as I did in my article about using AirPlay to find a dead mouse under our laundry room counter (see “Hunting for a Dead Mouse: AirPlay Receiver to the Rescue,” 6 February 2023).
While those thoughts from anniversary articles past continue to bounce around in my head, I’ve been focusing more on the importance of community of late, as I wrote in “What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses” (1 April 2026). I don’t have a lot more to say on that topic right now, other than to suggest that the world as we know it would like it to be is less directly threatened by AI, nuclear weapons, or even climate change than by people and what they choose to do or neglect. One thing that sets humans apart from all other living organisms is our capability to band together—for good or ill—in many different groups across space and time. So I encourage everyone reading this to think about what communities you participate in, how they make the world a better place, and what you can do to help them thrive.
Since you’re here, TidBITS is presumably one of those communities, so I have two small requests. First, one indication of a community’s strength is how long its members stay connected. I’d appreciate it if you could take this quick poll that asks when you started reading TidBITS. (Accuracy isn’t that important, so don’t stress if you can’t remember if it was 1993 or 1994, for instance.)
Second, if you have a story about how something you read in TidBITS or TidBITS Talk helped you out in a big way or made a significant impact on your life, please share it in the comments. Often, the impact of a community on an individual is visible only to that person, so the overall value becomes apparent only when people share how they’ve benefited.
Finally, I’d like to thank the 3472 TidBITS members for their financial support, which makes our work sustainable. If you value what we do and aren’t yet a member, we would welcome your support.
Not only even, but 1800 = 36 * 50.
Good Grief! I’d have to dust off some old Macs to find out when I found out about, and started reading TidBITS! Loooong Ago! I know as an Apple Store Specialist in 2009 I was even then heartily recommending y’all from years of experience, and was aware of your Internet Starter Kit ever further back. Possibly in the ‘90s, when I was active in HMAUS, Hawaii Mac-Apple UG, I was maybe… a subscriber to a TidBITS mailing list?
There are So Many Ways and Times other TBTers have helped! So many that I set aside my usual ‘I hate subscriptions’ policy and make an annual contribution to TB (which maybe doesn’t count as subscription).
It’s just… Golly it sounds so sappy but ‘back in the day’ I used to feel a commonality with other Mac users and UGroup members, and that faded away, and now although I sometimes post here at TBT too verbosely or frivolously, I still feel like my posts-comments are ok/acceptable/sometimes helpful, and as I am an idealistic, helpful person by nature, it is comforting to feel valued… So Thank Y’all at TidBITS HQ and TBT community, you’ve helped make my computing life immeasurably better.
Yeah, I noticed that too but wasn’t sure what to say about it. We regularly publish 48 issues per year now, but in the past we’ve had extra issues for April Fools and, farther back, when we had issues that needed to be longer than 30K (which used to be a hard limit). So that’s why we’re able to average 50.
Steady as she goes @ace…
I think it was 91, I had moved to the States and was setting up design studios. It was invaluable. I was using the Mac a few years at that point but my reading and research was almost entirely magazines from Byte to Amiga World up until then. In America, when I transitioned online to US services which were now a local call away… that’s when I clearly recall subscribing to TidBITs in those early days in New York.
Never had a bad experience here, that’s saying something.
I can’t remember the exact year I first started reading TidBits but it was in the early '90s.
I remember reading about the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (1st Edition, 1994) in the weekly TidBits so it predated that. I also learned about The Word Book for Macintosh Users—Make Microsoft Word 5.1 Work For You by Tonya Engst. That book was very useful as I was trying to write my dissertation using Word 5.1a.
I did not join TidBits Talk until much later – when Ric Ford shut down the user forums at MacInTouch.
I know that I subscribed to TidBITS HTML Announcements in 2006. But I really started participating in the community in 2021 after Ric Ford shut down the user forums at MacInTouch. I’m just glad that @ace welcomes refugees.
I, too, came here when MacInTouch became a blog. I think I waited for a while before registering. In any case, I value all of the accumulated knowledge that is available here, the massive amount of effort Adam puts into active moderation that keeps TBT focused, friendly, and relevant, and the range of user experience, from “I just want to use it” to “I like to code and use the command line”.
That’s why I made a donation for the first time a few months ago. The year end appeal for memberships and donations made me realize I should be helping to sustain TB/TBT!
I remember reading the hypercard stacks, which were kind of fun. Then I remember using a primitive text-formatting program to read the emails was used for many years. I have to say there was never any ONE big thing that TidBits did for me. It was more that I had a need for info that just. kept. coming. Year after year. I was a graphic designer, got my first Mac (Quadra!) in 1991, and I sent out the first fully electronic print job to a St. Louis printer - from floppy to film. Without all the many years of crucial information on every aspect of the Mac, networking, and the internet, I wouldn’t have had a job all through the 90s. The Internet Starter Kit must have been where it all started, back in 91. I had a friend who knew somebody at a local university, and he showed me Mosaic. It’s been a long time. I still turn to you guys when weird stuff happens. Until I remember to simply zap the PRAM, restart the beast, and repair my permissions, and, and, what century is this now?
To answer that poll, I had to fire up my G4 (Panther) to get at my Eudora email archive. It shows that I subscribed to TidBITS Talk on April 21, 1998. So I answered your poll with “1998.” BTW, that G4 is not my oldest working machine.
I lost my Eudora files prior to 2006, but I know I’ve been around longer than that. Here is the earliest issue I still have.
TidBITS#811/09-Jan-06
After a much-needed holiday hibernation, we’re back and ready
for the busy week ahead of us at Macworld Expo (be sure to check
the ExtraBITS Web page to stay current on what’s announced!).
While in San Francisco, we may wish that we had a Garmin iQue 3600
GPS device, which Travis Butler reviews in this issue. Also this
week, Geoff Duncan eulogizes the late Microsoft Internet Explorer
for the Mac, and we note the releases of History Hound 1.9 and two
new AirPort firmware updates, as well as a program to exchange CDs
for an iPod.
The earliest message in my Tidbits-Talk archive dates from August 1999. So I must have been reading the publication by that time.
I can remember sitting in my classroom, reading email on my iMac somewhere around 1996 or 7 when I got a email from a friend telling me about Tidbits. I replied that I had already been subscribing to it for several years. The Tech help in the school was not too good - one guy for many classrooms and teachers with a variety of technical abilities. I eagerly read the issues to learn as much as I could, and continue to do the same. I have donated for a number of years now, as I find it a valuable resource.
I forgot to mention that I briefly met you, Adam, at one of the MacWorld shows. It was one in Boston, or perhaps one in San Fransisco some years later.
I really can’t remember when I subscribed. All I know is it seems like this newsletter (and the Take Control books) have always been a trusted source. Congratulations, thanks for all the great issues, looking forward to a lot more.
It was in the early 90s. From tidbits I learned to buy Mac related things from Siberian Outpost where I bought my copy of Eudora, that I had to return because they initially sent me the windows version
Ahh … When ‘Decluttering’ the other day I came across a box of floppy disks with labels like “Hypercard Stacks #9 - #14” - full of memories I had no way of accessing anymore. My first Mac, an SE30, I had to import myself as it was only just released in the US, they were not yet available in New Zealand. (I bought it from ‘Kiwi Computers’ in LA, thinking they had a NZ connection, but they didn’t at all.) WAUG (the Wellington Apple Users Group) was a big help in those days and pointed me to TidBits. It’s been a wonderful 36 years - thank you Adam and Tonya!
I responded to the survey by guessing I started reading TidBITS in 1992, because I thought it was a long time back and couldn’t find any records. However, later I dug back into a file of articles I have written and found that in 1999 I reviewed FAXstf for TidBits. I think I wrote that shortly after discovering TidBITS. FAXstf was an app supposed to let you send send faxes from your computer and a regular modem rather than through a fax machine. It was a good idea but at the time I was writing faxing overseas a lot and FAXsft did not handle international calling codes well. I think that’s when Adam sent me the TidBITS mug I often use for tea.
Of late, Adam’s articles and the members of the TidBITS community have become my primary source of Mac-related news and solutions to the increasing number of computing problems that I keep cropping up as I grow older. Thanks, all.
I’ve been an admirer of TidBITS since 2003 when TidBITS Publishing, Take Control eBooks specifically, was a client of a company I worked for at the time. I wasn’t drawn in by the Take Control publications or by the TidBITS weekly newsletter, but by Tonya and Adam and their style. They were kind, down to earth, easy going and they treated their customers like royalty. (And they still do!) They were my kind of people! They had the most loyal client base of any company I had ever worked with. (And they still do!)
I began working with TidBITS directly in 2012 and between then and now there have been many changes to TidBITS the company, to Apple products and software, and to the world in general. But a couple of things remain the same:
I continue to be awed by the TidBITS readers and members and their generosity in sharing information in a constructive and genuine way, and for supporting Adam in his mission to create meaningful and interesting content about all things Apple. A cooler bunch of folks you will never find! Over the years, I have corresponded with TidBITS readers from all over the world and I feel comfortable and proud calling them friends.
And Adam, he is still kind, down to earth, and easy going and he continues to value his readers and members. And he writes a pretty mean newsletter each week, too, and as long as he continues to write it, I will continue to read it and value it! Cheers to another anniversary, Adam!
I’m having trouble remembering when I first started reading tidBits. Early nineties for sure. I was a teacher back then, borrowing the school Mac SE’s. I remember our library guy was our tech guy and he included TidBits text files on the floppy disks. No idea how he got them, probably by email, but in those days most of us didn’t have network connections or email accounts yet. There was nothing like ethernet, nothing like wifi, just floppy disks we passed around. I was a HyperCard enthusiast and bought my first Mac Classic in 1992(?). Do I remember TidBits in HyperCard stacks? Was that a thing? About half a lifetime ago, memory fades.
I can’t even begin to list all the ways tidBits has helped me over the years. Finding out about software, like 1Password, or Carbon Copy Cloner and dozens of others over the years that I can’t think of right now, that enhanced my computer life. The “Take Control” books, the tips and tricks, the security warnings, the recommendations for the timing of OS upgrades, all have made a difference in my life. I can’t thank you enough for the work you have done on this publication.
Was reading TidBITs in the 90s on a SE 30, on Setext (?) maybe, sometime before Tonya had a major accident. Such a long time ago!
Congratulations on these milestones, and on a really fun issue of TidBITS– I enjoyed the whole thing!
I realized as a result of this poll that I’ve been reading TidBITS intermittently since nearly the very beginning– my first TidBITS issues were HyperCard stacks downloaded from Sumex in 1991. I stopped reading for a while in the early 2000s when I didn’t have a Mac for a while, but iOS brought me back in the 2010s and I’ve been here ever since. (I’ve never been one to settle down with a single brand of technology, though since I got my first iPhone I’ve never been tempted to carry any other smartphone).
I’m having trouble thinking of a single concrete example of how TidBits influenced my life, but I’ll say it was one of several important influences that I encountered early in my adulthood that showed me what a career in technology might look like. I ran into Adam on the expo floor at my one and only visit to Macworld San Francisco and was a bit starstruck.
Anyway, congratulations and may TidBITS continue as long as it’s what you want to be doing!
What were the dates for the Hypercard stacks? I picked one of the earliest dates in the drop-down as a guess, but that’s when I started.
I think you’re right on (community is key and it has faded) - I emphatically (but sadly) was nodding my head through the whole “What Apple’s 50th Misses” article. It’s a very different world now, and I’m afraid it’s here to stay - we won’t ever be going back there. But as far as “what can we do about it” NOW? Swim upstream against the divisive trends - try to build/retain community, and never stop saying it “how it is” - that the Finder has been broken forever, and how I’m SO fed up with Apple’s arrogance and their insistence on doing things “for me” because, after all, they know BETTER, they KNOW everything I want before I ask for it. The hubris is… immeasurable. They may be taking longer to follow the prescribed story arc, but they’ll be going down, like every company who’s fallen before them because of their hubris.
My first computer was a TRS 80 from RadioShack. I used it to teach BASIC programming to my students in High School. My first family computer was an Apple IIC. Getting online to the Internet required using an acoustic modem and mass data storage was an audio tape recorder. I don’t remember the year. I do remember joining a couple of Apple Mac User Groups (MUGs) for help and community learning about the latest hardware and software. About that time TidBITS came along and it really made a difference. Adam’s focus on “Everything Apple” was just what I was looking for. When it came time to become a supporting member I readily joined. I grew to rely on the advice Adam would give about new releases of the various operating systems. Were they good, not so good, or wait for a better version. I watched TidBITS grew as the Apple hardware and applications grew. Now things are getting beyond me and my desire to keep up with everything. But I will still look to TidBITS for advice when I need help or want to know what is new or happening in the “wonderful world of Apple”. Oh, by the way, I just celebrated my 75th birthday…
Just want to play devil’s advocate for a moment: hasn’t Apple, at least since the Mac era began, always been this way? From the historic “no number pad or arrow keys” edict to the current unusable “carrying case” for the AirPods Max, I’d say Apple has a long history of removing ports, making both first party and third party software obsolete, putting power buttons in strange places, creating proprietary connectors and peripherals …the list goes on and on, no?
And:
…it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs, 1998
Point taken, but it’s maddening and I wanna call it “dumb luck”. Maybe I‘m an “odd duck” and have been irritated by more than my share of those “choices” that Steve & Co. made for me - and thanks for reminding me of the latest, the M4 Mini Power switch, I shake my head every time I turn mine on. Another newer one is on the M4 MacBook how touching any key (besides the POWER key) will turn the thing on. I use that “test” to verify I’ve shut the thing OFF before closing the lid.
But it truly is the community that formed early on, to “save” us from all those bad choices Apple made - ways to circumvent or minimize their impact over the most banal of choices. That was when the majority of people were discovering what computing could do for them and what they could do with it. Now it’s a commodity and the young users of today don’t give these things a thought - and I suspect plenty of them in the ranks at Apple. Change is fine, if it has legitimate purpose. Am I wrong in saying that Apple has made (more) changes to both hardware and software in recent years for (seemingly) NO productive purpose?
It occurred to me to wonder if I had contributed anything to TidBITS over the course of all those years, and a search reminded me that I have been mentioned in actual issues twice: sharing an anecdote after that same MacWorld in 1994, and again in 1999 with a correction about SurfDoubler– great product in the dial-up era!
I’ve been reading TidBits since the 32K emails started coming back in 1992 (according to Gemini AI, who corrected my assumption that I started reading in 1990). At the time, I was serving as the education director at a church in Central Florida. My nose was always in some radio back then as an amateur radio operator since 1970, so my computer life didn’t get started until 1986. My friend, who also served on our church education board, worked at a computer store. I’ll always remember visiting his store to find a computer to use at my church job. When I got to the store, Jerry sat me down at a PC Junior and gave me a quick tutorial about how to insert disks, the commands to type, etc., all so I could try to create a simple document. I think it involved a text doc plus a simple spreadsheet. After maybe 20 minutes fighting with DOS, he came over and asked me how I was doing. “Not so well,” was my response. He then told me that the store sold IBM and Apple computers. Would I like to try an Apple Mac? “Sure!” I said. The PC Jr experience wasn’t going so well, so I had nothing to lose and was ready to go back to 3x5 cards—my 1986 version of Hypercard, which I never used. That’s how I learned I didn’t get started as a TidBits subscriber until at least January 1992 with the switch from Hypercard downloads to 32k hard limit emails.
Jerry got me into Appleworks for my Mac debut, showed me how to use the mouse (the PC didn’t have one of those), and then went to help another customer while I played. Within 30 minutes, I had completed my church project using the GUI on a Mac 512Ke machine. When he came to check on me, I said, “I need one of these! I also need a disk to save all my work, because I’m not gonna do it all over again using 3x5 cards and my office IBM Selectric typewriter (the same one I learned on back in 1970 during tenth grade).
Somehow, over the next few weeks, we managed to convince the church to buy 3 Macs and a Laserwriter, plus a bunch of AppleTalk connectors and some RJ-11 telephone cables from Radio Shack. All for the bargain price of $11,000 (in 1986 dollars)! A feat I still can’t believe.
Sometime in 1992, I heard of TidBits and subscribed. I’ve been reading the weekly issues since around Issue #100 or so, according to my Gemini research. Within the next year or so, I found the Internet Starter Kit for Mac and read it cover-to-cover. I carried that tome around with me for years and referenced it many times, and used the floppy disk tools that were included. That got me started on the Internet. I’ll always remember my ham radio friends telling me during an on-the-air discussion while I was “mobile” heading somewhere, to get involved in the Internet. I had no idea what the Internet was. Adam, TidBits, and some forward-looking digital radio friends held my hands until I got started. Good memories. Thanks, Adam, Tonya, and the TidBits staff for many good years of help with my many Macs and all the other Apple tools that keep my digital life working smoothly to this day.
Paul — Amateur Radio operator N4FTD
A Happy M1 MacBook Air user
I asked it also, but my CompuServe address is long lost to memory, it reminded me that Mindspring started in 1994, and I definitely recall using that.
Gemini is a big fan of Adam “famously organized”.
I know I first got on the internet using Adam’s “Internet Starter Kit” around 1994-1995, so I think that’s when I also started reading TidBITS. It was after Hypercard, but still using “SetText” format.
As for major articles that changed my life, I have to give props to Matt Neuberg’s article on REALbasic in 1998:
That got me into REALbasic programming – a language/environment that is still around, though now called Xojo – and the basis of my living for the past 24 years (I produce an ezine about Xojo called xDev).
So yeah, TidBITS changed my life!
That would be Akif Eyler’s EasyView, which was a setext viewing app.
And from the other side, we had started working with eSellerate to sell Take Control ebooks, and there was this support person, Lauri, who kept going way above and beyond to help us and our customers when there were issues. So when Lauri was at loose ends some years later, we jumped at the chance to bring her stellar approach to customer service directly to TidBITS and Take Control. She has now been helping us for many years, and I can’t express how appreciative we are. Not only does Lauri help everyone who has trouble with our membership system, she’s always on the lookup for ways to improve things.
The HyperCard stacks went through TidBITS #100 in January of 1992. And you can read about the switch here! My sister converted the first 99 issues from HyperCard to setext shortly thereafter so we were able to make them all available online.
I agree that it’s important to swim upstream against the isolationist trends, but I think it’s important to keep the community positive and constructive rather than complaining about all the little things that may cause some people consternation. As others have said, Apple’s hubris has always been off the charts—that’s built into the company’s DNA—and it’s another reason why complaining doesn’t accomplish anything.
Share solutions, not complaints.
Ooo, what does it think I famously organized?
I get the Internet Starter Kit confused with the Internet Connection Kit. The ICK is how I got on the Internet.
Well, no citations were provided
… but the quote was “Since TidBITS is still run by its original founder, Adam Engst, they are famously organized.”
How did I already know about you guys back in the 80’s? I was at MacroMind until 1990 and already reading something you were writing. And remember Jon Pugh’s Netters Dinners?
Congratulations on such amazing tenure. I must have started with TidBITS not long after you adopted setext.
I was inspired by your efforts and produced similarly formatted documents to share with Apple dealers across Australia when I worked for Apple. Pre-internet but we did have AppleLink (a dial-up accessed system that had some similarities with CompuServe).
Incredible to think how far we’ve travelled since TidBITS founding. For some of us like Adam, Tonya and I, Macs have been around for our whole working life.
Hard to reconcile that we once worked with 512K of RAM and 512x384 pixels. A modern Apple Watch packs millions of times more RAM, thousands of times more CPU performance, and about 10 times the display pixels of a 1985 Macintosh 512K, all on your wrist. Astounding.
That was the one (and only) time I met Adam. I think Tonya was there too (but could certainly be wrong). Tristan was still just a twinkle.
It wasn’t inconceivable, but we didn’t do anything with TidBITS until April 1990. We had gone to Macworld Expo in Boston in 1989, so perhaps we met then?
The Netters Dinners were one of the highlights of Macworld San Francisco. The first year I went, which would have been January 1992, I think, I stayed with a friend in Oakland and tried to spend as little as possible on food by eating at press events. The Netters Dinner may have been my only food expense for the week. I do remember being gently mocked by Jon Pugh, though it turned out that many of the people in the room did read TidBITS, which softened the blow. After that, I attended every Netters Dinner until Macworld folded.
My first-read-Tidbits year (2005), is a guesstimate.
Congrats Adam, and the rest of the TidBits team. Keep up the good work !!
The earliest instance of Tidbits in my archives is 1998 or so, though I remember getting a Hypercard version. Even found something called Newton Tidbits, but I don’t think that was from the current team. Have enjoyed the articles over the years and always telling my wife when we have an Apple issue “I’ll talk to my Tidbits guys” (this is a term that includes all genders).
Thanks Adam and the team for all your work over the years.
My first Mac was an SE purchased in 1987, with which I did some early DNA sequence analysis, and wrote my PhD thesis, but it wasn’t until I started my postdoc at UW-Madison in 1989 that I really did much of anything online. I’m pretty sure I started reading TidBITS earlier, but the oldest instance a quick search turns up is a subscription acknowledgement from July 25, 1997. I know I already had found the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh indispensable, especially in a work environment largely dominated by MS-DOS.
One of those Netters Dinners is why I consider you a good luck charm.
For those who didn’t get to go: the Dinners were held at a Chinese restaurant on Sansome St. in San Francisco. This is an intense urban area, after all, it’s one of the world’s major cities. I’m a local, spent lots of time in SF, and knew what to expect when it came to trying to find parking around there. Public transit wasn’t an option. I lived 40 miles away, and the night train service back then was erratic.
So Adam got into my car and off we went. We drove by the restaurant to scope it out, and …
There was a space in front of their door. A legal space. During dinnertime.
SERIOUSLY!?
I mean - this only happens in the movies.
The dinners are long gone, and I’ve never again experienced bliss like that. Luckily, public transit is much better these days.
Dr. Julian “a tribble took it” Gómez ** www.polished-pixels.com ** @3dscientist.bsky.social
I always enjoy a good work of fiction; we don’t get to see many of those here on TBT.
I think the one and only time I met Adam in person was a Netters’ Dinner in the way back. My only Mac community at the time was MAUG on CompuServe, and the first issue of TidBITS I ever read was a HyperCard stack that someone had posted there. When I was trying to figure out what year that might have been, I ran into an interview Adam did with Neil Shapiro, founder of MAUG, back in 2000. Memories.
In case it’s not clear to anyone else: the story is not fiction.
I want to say the name was “Hunan Cuisine”. Or maybe I’m just remembering a type of food. The walk there and back from Moscone in the brisk night air was a small price to pay for a wonderful evening (and really good food, as I recall). I was impressed that @ace could lead a pack of 70-80 people through the streets of an unfamiliar city, but I don’t recall any sheep going astray.
Yes, the Hunan at Sansome and Broadway. And yes, we did walk most years—I could only lead the group in later years because I’d followed Jon Pugh and some others so many times before that. (I think I could still do the walk, but the Hunan closed in 2020.)
Thank you Adam for noting this anniversary and its numerical hints.
A couple of additional thoughts about 36 and 18(00).
In Hebrew the word for “life” is חי. Hebrew letters also serve as numbers. The numerical equivalent of חי is 18. So, in a sense we’ve reached eighteen hundred times “LIFE”.
Double חי is 36. Hebrew: לו. What’s actually interesting about that is: a tradition exists that there are 36 hidden righteous individuals in the world without whom the world would not be able to exist. I’m glad to celebrate 36 years of righteous reporting on the Apple world. (You can learn more at Wikipedia: Tzadikim Nistarim - Wikipedia ).
I found TidBITS in university all those years ago. I’ve managed to migrate my email from various systems and clients over the years so my archives in MailMate go back to the very first email I sent. And I’ve saved my TidBITS issues since I started reading it. It was an exciting time even if Apple was struggling:
These are lovely little bits of numerology—thanks!
Well observed. And let’s recall how vehemently opposed Steve was to making the inner workings of a Mac accessible or expandable to an end user. In the parallel universe “personal computers” were in large cases that opened with the twist of a screwdriver, port covers that could be removed so that accessory cards could poke their sockets out the back, and other strange and scary things that he’d seen Woz doing to circuit boards and boxes in that garage where the whole thing started.
My Mac SE had a SCSI connector and (I think) a headphone port, and that was it. The expansion port inside the box wasn’t supposed to be accessible to the likes of me. Somewhere in my “Mac Museum” I have, in addition to the SE itself, the “cracker kit” that allowed me to reach the two bolts buried deep in the case and literally crack it open to reach the internals. That’s how I got my Mobius monitor card up and running.
And Steve would have hated it but he had already been deposed from Apple by the time I did that.
Seeing the sponsor list reminds me of the power TidBITS had (and still has) to point its user base in particular directions. I had at least two APS drives (one hard drive and one tape drive for backup), a PowerTower Pro clone from Power Computing before Steve came back and shut them down, and an America Online account that I used to host the first Web site I built on behalf of an employer. And I carried files back and forth from that employer with help from StuffIt Deluxe!
It was very difficult for me to pick out a single time TidBITS saved my life because, reading since the early 90s means that there’s too much to choose from. Eventually I realized that it was back in the awful, torturous days of System 7 that TidBITS helped me most.
Nowadays I can mostly just ENJOY reading TidBITS, though I still count on it to reassure me about system updates and minor threats. But back in the late 90s, when I was an Art Director at a small agency, TidBITS was essential for keeping our office from totally falling apart.
We didn’t have the money for a dedicated IT guy, so it fell on me to keep an eye on things and try to keep archive and backups in order. Keep the tenuous internet connection from failing. All that.
At the same time, I had to do my design work in Quark XPress, Adobe, Freehand, and all that while restarting my machine up to ten or more times a day! System 7 was such a crappy system for so many years that I’ve kind of blocked it out. I can still remember vividly the slowly-dawning awareness that Steve Job’s new MacOSX was actually stable enough that my computer could run all day long without a reboot. It felt astonishing.
Anybody who went through this had a large and robust ecosystem of Mac publications to rely on, but TidBITS is the only survivor, besides maybe MacWorld. My gratitude for all the help you gave us back then can never be forgotten.
I must’ve started reading tidbits in the 1990’s. I recall it being in the setext format and I read it at work on a VT220 terminal connected to a VAX/VMS system. No mouse, no hyperlinks, no graphics, just ascii characters. Sounds primitive, but simpler would be a better word (and in many ways more enjoyable).
I remember buying the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (probably Second Edition) when I enrolled in my first class at the University of Oslo in August of 1994. Among other things it introduced me to TidBITS and I have been a subscriber since then. Although I’ve changed email address a few of times since then.
Regards,
Georg Sirnes Lundesgaard
Fun thread. I remember the transition from Hypercard stacks to SetText and I remember using the EasyViewer reader program, so I guess that’s 1992. Those were the days of using Compuserve Navigator to log on and run automated sessions through various forums – my first experiences with being a part of an online community.
I was living in the SF Bay Area when I discovered TidBITS, around 1993 or 1994. I was a 25-year-old budding Mac enthusiast working at Silicon Valley’s largest PR agency at the time, which happened to be a Mac shop. Can’t remember specifically how I came across TidBITS, but I subscribed and have ever since. In recent years have been happy to be part of the annual support program. I appreciate all of the work you and Tonya (and your extended team of contributors) have done over the years, and it’s been fun watching from afar as your have raised a family as I did during the same years. Time flies…..
Addendum: I guess I started reading TidBITS around 1990-1991.
The February 1984 issue of BYTE magazine had An Interview: The Macintosh Design Team which discussed their reasoning. Here’s a link to the text from the interview: BYTE Interview with the Creators of the Macintosh from 1984.
The gist was that…
Also, should recognize that giving users access to the Macintosh was dangerous! It had a CRT inside!
[Sorry, I meant a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT), and Recommended Standard 232 (RS-232)]
* That’s straight from the interview: “Rather than putting in serial ports that operate at 9600 or 92,000 bits per second […]”, but I bet that was a transcription error in the original interview. 19.2 kbps would make more sense.
I agree that he probably said 19,200 (pronounced “nineteen point two thousand”), which might have been mistakenly transcribed as “92,000”.
That having been said…
PC serial ports could always go up to 115,200 bps, but the 8250 UART typically used at the time only has a 1 byte buffer (generating an interrupt for every byte received), so at high bit-rates (anything above 9600), software often couldn’t keep up, causing characters to get dropped.
Enthusiasts would replace their 8250 chips with 16550A chips, which have a 16 byte buffer (and the later 16550AFN, which supports DMA), allowing reliable behavior at high bit-rates.
These faster UARTs became critical when dial-up modems got faster than 9600 bps (e.g., 14400, 28K and 56K).
Still, the Mac’s RS-422 capability had that beat out of the box, and its other capabilities made LocalTalk a practical reality, requiring only cheap transceivers, not expensive network interface cards.
AT&K3for the win?What was the typical modem speed back then? I think I was using a 300 bps modem to connect my original Macintosh to a BBS.
With respect to the standards, the release dates for the most popular data rates were:
But with respect to what was popular and was used by normal human beings, the world was mostly 300 bps in 1984, with some people running at 1200.
When I started college in 1987, 1200 bps was cheap and common, and 2400 bps was not too expensive.
And everybody was running at 2400 from then until until dial-up Internet became a thing in the mid-90’s, when everybody started buying 14.4K and faster modems pretty much as fast as they were invented.
But all that having been said, serial ports were used for a lot more than modems. Even in the PC world, they were used for printers, plotters, and for connecting to hard-wired connections to servers (especially in business and academic environments). And for those uses, people wanted to drive the lines as fast as possible, with 9600 bps being a minimum, and faster speeds whenever possible.
h/t Wikipedia and the Linux Modem HOWTO file.
Oh, man, that’s right!
I bought my first modem for my Mac SE in a parking lot, literally. A friend hooked me up with a guy who met me in a parking lot in Cambridge, I handed him $75 cash, and he handed me a bag with a box, a power adapter, and a RS-232 cable. 1200-baud, and it seemed light-years faster than the 300-baud modem on the Commodore-64 I had owned previously.
Also:
And (weirdly), I was subscribing to BYTE at that time and I had a vague glimmering recollection of the article, or another one like it. Thanks for the link!
It’s got to have been 1991, which is when I got internet access through college. Back then they came as HyperCard stacks, but I’m not sure how I would have got them - possibly through the Info-Mac archive?
My earliest mailsteward record from [email protected] is dated December 2007. That is probably later that actually reading started. I my TidiBITS award says I joined in April of 2018. MacInTouch also had been part of my regular reading. Sometime around 2022 or so I also discovered Howard Oakley’s eclecticlight.co – I was able to quit spending time developing shell coded tools and use Howard’s tools instead. My TidBITS usage is pretty general. Eclecticlight.co is home to heavy discussions of macOS betas and art history. I have been know to contribute to both on occasion.
My external memory for such events is in my local Mail archives and, recently, Mailsteward. I am often astonished at the supportive appreciation of my efforts by TidBITS users. I have been doing this kind of activity for so many years that I find fascination with occasional retrospective looks at my history.
I looked in my last MBPro which contains sent email back to 2002 (not sure where I have older mail) and found a Dec 2005 email to friends in which I recommended an e-book from tidbits and mentioned that I found the site useful so I must have been already at least a fan by then, so at least more than half the run of TB!
My G4 iMac and another MBPro I had used before were at some point converted for my wife’s use so my email on those must be on a backup drive somewhere. I thought I had dragged my whole email history (much more portable than file cabinets of paper letters) through various software/hardware changes but apparently not.
Like several others, I became a ‘regular’ here once Ric closed Macintouch down to user discussions. He was quick to recommend Tidbits as an alternative and I’m glad I followed his cues. I feel I had some inconsequential contact with Tidbits before that, but never much participation beyond reading the occasional article.
Whilst I no longer manage anything beyond my home network, it’s reassuring to have such a breadth of knowledge available here for those times my brain glitches. Tidbits has become a daily visit for me, and I very much enjoy the community feel it provides, along with the expansive technical expertise.