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.
Fax machines are useful in certain situations, no doubt, but indiscriminate use of fax machines strikes some as problematic, especially considering that thermal fax paper cannot be recycled
Apple handed out CD-ROMs containing alpha release 9 of System 7.0 to developers last week. Some interesting features of System 7.0 will include (if you haven't seen this everywhere already) a new and improved Finder, built-in file sharing capabilities, file aliases, outline fonts, application communication abilities, and virtual memory
Recently the CheckFree electronic banking service has become available on the Mac after being available on the PC for some time. Based on reports from subscribers also on Usenet, CheckFree might be an expensive proposition
In a news item that was completely missed by the trade magazines this week, Symantec and Peter Norton Computing announced plans to merge. A number of people on Usenet saw the news in the LA Times and the NY Times (sorry, no specific references were mentioned)
Those people who either attend or work at educational institutions are often eligible for significant discounts on computer hardware and software. The computer companies view the discounts as a good way of attracting future members of the business world to their products, and members of educational institutions view the discounts as just reward for the often-lower salaries of higher education in comparison to big business
Manuel Bouyssou from Paris reports that the first 68040 machine on the market will probably be the next NeXT (perhaps the NeXT YeT? This is another name that's going to be difficult, much like the upgrade to Symantec's MORE, which was called MORE II, but which many people felt should have been called Still MORE.) The 68040 will run at 50 MHz and the black box will contain 8 megabytes of memory, a faster floptical drive with access times around 40 to 45 milliseconds, and an internal 300 megabyte hard drive
TML Systems is developing a set of seven software modules that, when completed, will challenge Microsoft Works 2.0. Collectively called Zebra, the modules share tools with each other so appropriate tools are available in any module (i.e
We at TidBITS have a fondness for interesting ways of connecting computers together, which accounts for a number of past articles on networking with radio waves and electric lines
When it first arrived, everyone liked the Apple standard SCSI because it was relatively fast and easy to use. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that SCSI was not the answer to the Mac's problems and might even cause some of them
It may not be able to avoid airport metal detectors, but Colby Systems hopes that its new Mac portable will be less obtrusive than other entries in the portable market
Last week Microsoft said that version 2.0 of its OS/2 operating system would be binary compatible with future versions of Windows. Theoretically, applications designed for Windows would run transparently under Presentation Manager, though the reverse is unlikely
Verity, Inc. has announced a product that will scan an incoming news feed such as Dow Jones's Dow Vision information service and filter the information according to a weighted keyword system (no mention was made of Usenet)
The latest rumors on Usenet concerning the next generation Macintosh CPU have been leaning toward the 68040. Some time ago, MacWEEK reported that Apple was looking to the Motorola 88000 series of RISC chips to power the next Macintoshes
Almost everyone who owns a DeskWriter (or DeskJet) printer from Hewlett Packard has complained about the ink, which is soluble in water. Although few people have specifically had problems with dunking their printouts, most people worry about the possibility
Someone on Usenet with a penchant for the bleeding edge of technology had a number of problems with a IIfx and a Radius Pivot Monitor recently. Among them were incompatibilities with MacsBug 6.1, SuperPaint 2.0, Syserr DA, Cricket Graph 1.3, and MacPaint 2.0