[Editor's Note: This is the first in what will hopefully be a long string of columns from John C. Fuller probing the edges and the futures of computing

Well, I'm back, more or less. I won't completely take over until I get my network connections to the rest of the civilized (read: electronic) world up and running (note that the address below may not work, and I should have a better one soon), and it's taking a long time for even the snail mail to return to normal

Recently, I went to the local Macintosh Users' Group meeting here in Seattle. dBUG (for downtown Business Users' Group) as it's called, is ever so slightly different from MUGWUMP (Macintosh Users' Group for Writers and Users of Macintosh Programs, or something similar), the users' group in Ithaca

During some of the information-free contemplation that I've been forced to perform recently, I've come to what might be an important conclusion. Alternately, it might be completely trivial, but I can't tell yet

TidBITS readers are nothing if not opinionated! Reader Andrew Lewis commented on our recent article about the Help Menu that the "Apple propaganda" seemed a bit much for TidBITS, and that [as Ken Hancock pointed out last issue] SuperClock 3.9 works fine with System 7 and the Help Menu anyway

As we promised (threatened?) at the end of our special Macworld Expo issue two weeks ago, there's more to say about the Expo that just didn't fit. Here's a little bit more material from Ilene Hoffman's Expo coverage that doesn't need a special issue but deserves mentioning. The best new utility for power users at the show was Hard Disk Toolkit (HDT), a SCSI formatting utility from hard drive manufacturer FWB, Inc

As if the recent pendulum-like events in the Soviet Union weren't confusing enough, Apple and Adobe, the on-again, off-again adversaries in the type wars, have announced that they've signed a letter of intent that calls for the inclusion of Adobe Type 1 font technology within a future version of System 7. Apple's 20 August press release states that the rasterizer technology that has been sold as Adobe Type Manager since October of 1989 will soon be incorporated into the Macintosh system software

Thanks to MacWEEK and their ability to sniff out the facts ahead of time, we're all starting to get some glimpses of this fall's slate of new Macintosh computers

Longtime reader and contributor Ken Hancock sent along several comments regarding the last few issues. On the subject of data compression in the DoveFax+, Ken noted that V.42 is an error correcting protocol; V.42bis is the corresponding data compression protocol

Apple recently sounded Taps for the venerable Mac Plus by removing some related items from its price lists. Although the Mac Plus itself has been off the price list since last fall, when it was replaced by the Mac Classic, Apple has continued to offer the upgrades required to turn a 128K or 512K Macintosh into a Plus

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry, it's said, so it is particularly nice to be able to report that some recent plans of mice and men came off just fine

It's always nice to hear about a company that provides an unusually high level of customer service, and when I do, I like to pass the news along so that the company's efforts are rewarded

Last week's issue of TidBITS contained an article about the astronauts on board the space shuttle Atlantis planning to use AppleLink from space to communicate with ground personnel

CE Software, Inc., the publisher of QuickMail, QuicKeys2, and a bunch of other neat products, has just announced a new version of QuickMail designed to work with KanjiTalk, Apple's Japanese version of the Mac operating system

Apple is expected to release a series of three computers this October that will be the first Macs that deserve the name "notebook computer." That doesn't mean, though, that the rest of the industry should hold its collective breath! Outbound Systems Inc