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.
Douglas Wyman writes, "At the Las Vegas 90 Fall COMDEX I saw a prototype digital camera which used EEROM cards instead of still-video floppies to record images
Everyone has been complaining for the last few years about System 7 needing 2 MB of RAM to run. Given the low price of memory (about $40 per MB), getting another megabyte shouldn't bankrupt too many people
I'm always interested in newer and bigger forms of mass storage, and a number of interesting announcements have come out in the last few months. Probably the storage device that will gain acceptance the fastest is the 88 MB SyQuest drive, which will first appear from PLI, MicroNet, and Mass Microsystems
One of my favorite people to talk to is Ward Bond, president of Infogrip, because he always pushes the envelope of technology. Infogrip makes the BAT chord keyboard, which should show up in the Mac market after they get enough money to pay an industrial designer to snazz it up for picky consumers
As much as it would be a blast, we can't invite the thousands of you to the wedding. Tonya and I are getting married on June 15th, 1991, in a place probably best described as "somewhere in the middle of New York State." The ground rules for the wedding include (a) no one is allowed to wear uncomfortable shoes, and (b) if anyone absolutely has to wear a tie (which isn't encouraged), it had better be a fish tie
Second, I foolishly said something nasty about how MIPS RISC chips weren't used in the mainstream RISC boxes. Bryan Van Vliet and Frank Nagy both corrected me on this one, since both DEC and Silicon Graphics use the MIPS chips and together hold about 23% of the market
After all that work and trouble to get 576 signatures on our letter to Apple, Connectix announced a software patch called MODE32 which lessens the need for new ROMs for the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30
I enjoy taking photographs, but since I'm not independently wealthy, I can't afford the cost of processing tons of pictures, much less the cost of some of the equipment I'd like
Despite being essentially boring technology (ooo, I can just tell some people aren't going to like that one), CD applications are taking off. First there's Kodak's PhotoCD system for storing pictures, and now along comes Commodore with CDTV
Check out page 4 of the 07-May-91 issue of MacWEEK for the first time I've been quoted by a national magazine. Thanks to Henry Norr for including it.
Emery Berger corrects our TechnoBITS article on Iterated Systems's fractal compression board since we blew it and missed the final sentence of the original BYTE article
System system, who's got the system? Apple has a couple of them that you might be interested in, so pay attention. You thought that System 7 was going to be the only System Software released in the next few months, but you weren't counting on 6.0.8
I probably can't sue for the use of my initials, and a group like the Advanced Computer Environment probably wouldn't notice anyway (besides, then I'd have to consort with lawyers :-))
These pseudo-sporadic columns are fun, if only because then I don't have to think of new titles all the time. I'm anticipating a ton of news related to System 7, so this space will collect what's interesting.
First off, Dantz was nice enough to send out a free upgrade of Retrospect a few days ago
Compression is a hot field these days, with everyone trying to squeeze the last few bytes from a compressed file. A company called Iterated Systems might top them all though, with its compression board for PC-clones
An anonymous elf writes, "Just as a word of notice, neither DOS Mounter nor the current Access PC work under System 7.0."
Gene Spafford writes, though not to us directly, "On March 2nd, thieves stole 3000 computer chips from one of a major computer manufacturer's California locations