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Adam Engst

Adam Engst

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS. He has written numerous books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993, and the Take Control electronic book series now owned and operated by alt concepts. His awards include the MDJ Power 25 ranking as the most influential person in the Macintosh industry outside of Apple every year since 2000, inclusion on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community, and being named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And yes, he has been turned into an action figure.

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One Minute Magazine

According to a recent Newsbytes article that a friend found floating around at Apple, KOFY-TV, channel 20 in the San Francisco area, will be broadcasting a one-minute-long "magazine" early in the morning of 1 October

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A New Voice

Recent discussions on USENET have mentioned a new version of MacInTalk that's supposedly in the works at Apple. Last year MacInTalk sparked some heated debates when Apple announced the aging speech-synthesis software would no longer be supported and could not be counted on to work with future system software or hardware releases

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Integrated Software Wars

Back in the early days of Macintosh, when a list of all the software available for the Mac could be printed in the back of every issue of MacUser, a small company called Lotus introduced a new product class for the Mac: integrated software

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MailBITS/29-Jul-91

Adam and Tonya and their cats are busy moving this week! So that they can concentrate on finding a new place to live in the Redmond, WA area, settle into new surroundings and new jobs, and relax a little, I've volunteered to be your Guest Editor for a few weeks

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SevenBITS/29-Jul-91

Since the May introduction of System 7, Apple has been shipping all computers with a coupon that users can mail to Apple, good for a free copy of System 7

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NewsBITS/29-Jul-91

Novell is supposed to buy DRI (Digital Research Inc, makers of C/PM in the past and DR DOS in the present). This will give Novell a network OS and a desktop OS, which competes with Microsoft's inclusion of networking hooks in DOS and Windows

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DoveFax+ Hears Voices

One of the more interesting modem spin-offs recently is the DoveFax+. I'm personally not all that impressed with fax technology, but I think sticking fax capabilities in a modem is a good way to avoid killing more trees

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AppleLink in Space

The upcoming flight of the space shuttle Atlantis, which has been delayed a couple of times this month, will be a first for the information age. NASA's astronauts will be carrying aboard a Macintosh Portable that has been outfitted with an off-the-shelf modem and a customized version of the AppleLink software, and they'll be connecting to AppleLink and sending electronic mail from space. While this isn't the first time e-mail has been sent or received from space (earlier missions have included packet radio BBS experimenting), it will certainly be the first use of Apple's online service from space (assuming everything works as planned)

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MailBITS/22-Jul-91

This is it, my last issue for a few weeks. Remember, send all TidBITS related mail to Mark H. Anbinder ([email protected] or [email protected]). My mail will be collected and forwarded eventually, but there's no telling what could go wrong

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TechnoBITS/22-Jul-91

There's been a lot of grumbling among my academic friends about how hard it is to protect a Macintosh in a public lab. Apparently the best solution so far is to use Suitcase II to load DAs into the Apple Menu and to make the entire System Folder invisible

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QuickTime

By now, I'm sure that you've all heard about QuickTime, Apple's multimedia extension to the Mac's system software. I personally have had trouble internalizing what QuickTime will mean to the normal Macintosh user

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MissingBITS/22-Jul-91

It seems that I can never catch up with everything I want to write about, and since we're moving in a week or so, I just thought I'd mention the items that will be lost in the shuffle

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MAZ Returns

Ben Schaffe was kind enough to forward this message to me, posted for Naoto Horii on GEnie by Bruce Tomlin of SoundMaster fame. Ben also mentioned that MaxAppleZoom 1.4 was out, and when I looked on America Online, I saw version 1.43

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MailBITS/15-Jul-91

In late breaking news (I just heard this morning from Mark H. Anbinder and others) it appears that Borland, one of the main PC developers, has purchased Ashton-Tate, makers of dBASE IV, FullWrite, and Full Impact

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SevenBITS/15-Jul-91

I just heard from Roy McDonald (president of Connectix) that they have a newer and snazzier version of MAXIMA. I haven't received the copy that he said they sent me, but I'll write more about it later